Families just like yours

Sandie and I have both been looking through adoption-related books online lately. At Amazon, primarily. Amazon has more reviews than any other online bookstore I’ve seen. Many of the reviews are really insightful, and there have been several occasions where they have inspired me to revise my shopping list.

Sometimes, though, reviewers’ concerns or issues color their comments so much that these reviews become virtually useless for others.

One of the issues for some of the adoption book reviewers seems to be the composition of adoptive families. I found reviews from single mothers who, instead of evaluating a book on its merits, stated that they had simply chosen not to purchase this book because the family portrayed included a father. Likewise, I saw reviews from adoptive two-parent families dismissing other books simply because no father was depicted.

I found myself somewhat puzzled. Things like an interesting, well-written story and engaging illustrations are my top priorities for a picture book – and these are the things that I, like most readers, hope to learn about in a book review. A comparison of the fictional family and the family of some stranger on the internet just isn’t all that helpful or relevant to me.

Now, I do understand the impulse to give your child books and things that speak directly to her situation. When I visited American Girl Place last year, I was fascinated with Jess, the 2006 American Girl doll of the year, because she was half Japanese (like my own hypothetical children would be). Even though I don’t have a daughter (or even the prospect of one on the horizon), I still considered digging deep into my wallet to purchase the doll. (How often do you find a mixed race doll, anyway?) It’s important for children to see that there are interesting, worthwhile people (fictional or non-) who look like they do, act like they do, have experiences like theirs, or are similar in some other respect.

As a child, I enjoyed books like that - books where I felt like could relate to the characters. Periodically I came across a character who maintained her self-esteem even while displaying a terrible shock of ginger hair; or one who prospered even though she shared some very familiar weaknesses. It was comforting to feel that, even if I was flawed, at least I wasn’t uniquely flawed. ;)

But the characters in my beloved books didn’t have to be my Doppelgängers for me to relate to them. Even when I was very young, I, like any child, was able to make the imaginative leap between myself and the strong-willed badger heroine of Bread and Jam for Frances, between my concerns and those of the humble little pig in Charlotte's Web; I didn’t need to sprout a striped pelt or grow a snuffly snout to see myself in them. I loved the pioneer stories like the Little House on the Prairie series and Caddie Woodlawn, and I adored learning about Jewish life in turn-of-the-century New York through the sisters of All-of-a-kind Family, even though my own life was very different.

It was wonderful to be able to visit these fictional (or semi-fictional) worlds, so different from my own, and yet so similar. How many things I learned, and how many questions followed, with so many new experiences to process. I would not have learned so much if the protagonists had been just like me.

Details of self, family, community, faith, may differ in any given book, but our human concerns, deep down, remain the same: Who am I? Where do I fit in my family and my community? Am I loved? Is there some higher or deeper meaning to my life? Will the world be a better place because I was here? It is this common humanity, the things that make us human, that bring us together.

I think there would be room in my adoptive child's library for stories that reflect her specific experiences, for stories that speak to her on a more universal level, and for stories that do a little of both. She'd miss out on so much otherwise.