My only disappointment in this book is that I picked it up immediately following the completion of reading her book "The Knitting Circle". I was so touched by "The Knitting Circle" that I blindly picked up another Ann Hood book from the library. I was a little disappointed to find that our main character is dealing with the exact same issue (the unexpected death of a young daughter) as the one in "The Knitting Circle". However, this book delved into some cultural differences I never understood, and showed the difficulty of the adoption process from different angles, different demographics, and different family situations. Very cool. An easy read, and quite satisfying. This is a tale of several couples who are going through the process of adopting a baby girl from China. Maya, the adoption center director, gets the most face time in the book; she is trying to redeem herself from what she perceives as a past wrong. The others also have a background story that is shown.The first thing that struck me about this book is that the couples are far from perfect couples who are going into the process with open minds and hearts. Some of the characters are rather distasteful. I ended up hoping that few of them actually ended up with a child. It didn't seem like they were doing it for the right reasons, or their marriages seemed so fragile that it didn't seem like they could withstand the adoption process. I suppose the reality of why people adopt children from overseas is more interesting, but certainly I had a romanticized version of perfect, altruistic couples adopting before this book took the wind out of my sails. My main complaint with this book is that there were too many characters. It took quite a while to get the characters down since there are something like 11, and they all have secrets. Then you add in the existing children of the main characters and the back stories of the Chinese families that gave up their girls for adoption (fascinating!), and it really does get unwieldy for a 300 page book. Consequently, it's more disjointed than I had expected.
What do You think about El Hilo Rojo (2014)?
Excellent book - true characters, sweet & thoughtful writing......
—Katelin
Another great book,about adoptions and the people involved
—ladis_laurette
