Inconvenient Daughter
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“Illuminates with cutting truth the layers of longing and grief which underlie a transracial adoption . . . sharply written, intense, and page-turning.” —Randy Susan Meyers, bestselling author of Waisted Rowan Kelly knows she’s lucky. After all, if she hadn’t been adopted, she could have spent her days in a rice paddy, or a windowless warehouse assembling iPhones—they make iPhones in Korea, right? Either way, slowly dying of boredom on Long Island is surely better than the alternative. But as she matures, she realizes that she’ll never know if she has her mother’s eyes, or if she’d be in America at all had her adoptive parents been able to conceive. Rowan sets out to prove that she can be someone’s first choice. After running away from home—and her parents’ rules—and ending up beaten, barefoot, and topless on a Pennsylvania street courtesy of Bad Boy Number One, Rowan attaches herself to Never-Going-to-Commit. When that doesn’t work out, she fully abandons self-respect and begins browsing Craigslist personals. But as Rowan dives deeper into the world of casual encounters with strangers, she discovers what she’s really looking for. With a fresh voice and a quick wit, Lauren J. Sharkey dispels the myths surrounding transracial adoption, the ties that bind, and what it means to belong. A Finalist for Foreword Review’s 2020 INDIES Book of the Year Award in Adult Fiction—Multicultural “Stirring . . . a moving account of Rowan’s difficult reckoning with her identity. This is an adept portrayal of the long shadow of abuse and the difficulty of being an adoptee.” —Publishers Weekly
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Never has a book resonated with me quite like this one.
Like the protagonist Rowan (and the author, Sharkey), I was adopted as an infant by a Catholic family in New York State. (Theirs, Irish Catholic on Long Island; mine, Italian Catholic in Rochester.) We were “raised to be white,” which is a sentence I spent a while trying to articulate recently. While Rowan's path is not my own, I see in her story an alternate reality.
I saw so many parts of myself in this book. For POC and Korean transracial adoptees, this is one of the most validating experiences – to be acknowledged, to be seen. Sharkey says it best: “You are Asian to the people around you but not to yourself.” Transracial adoptees exist in a liminal state. We're on the outside looking in, usually on both sides. Even if we're assimilated and consider ourselves mostly white, we still face othering. We're potentially considered more Korean than our biracial/hapa friends. When people pressure us to tell us where we're really from, they're always victorious when they poke hard enough for us to reveal that no, we weren't born in this country.
All I have to say about this book is that if you want to begin exploring what Korean transracial adoption is like for adoptees from an #ownvoices perspective, find a copy of this book.
3:
This was terribly sad and unexpectedly violent. Rowan's feelings of rejection and the way she dealt with them were hard to witness, especially in the latter half of the book which for the most part left me unsettled.
I wish there had been a bit more character development, or that her relationship with her mom could have been improved somewhat, it seems to me that they stayed the same in the end regardless of everything that went down. But since this is semi-autobiographical, I can see why that may have been.
