Review: Lucky Baby by Meredith Efken

After years of swearing she’d never be a mother–particularly because she doesn’t want to turn into her mother, who withheld her approval from Meg–Meg longs to adopt a child. She and her husband, Lewis, adopt an older girl from China, desiring both to give Eva a home and to overcome their pasts of emotional family hurts.

But things aren’t all sugar and spice. Eva, dealing with her own abandonment issues (courtesy of her mother) and the separation from her best friend at the Chinese orphanage, proves to be rebellious, challenging Meg’s and Lewis’s ideals of parenthood, family, and love.

Efken writes with sensitivity toward cultural differences without losing either individual personalities or broadly shared human elements. In this way, she aptly portrays how individual and cultural experiences shape our beliefs and struggles without defining them. Her rich prose weaves in magical realism reminiscent of Haruki Murakami, lending the story a wisp of the spiritual world without overwhelming the audience with it. This magical realism, making use of dragon image, also bridges the Eastern and Western worlds in which she writes.

The book deals with some difficult issues–mixed-faith marriage, family abandonment (both physical and emotional) and anxiety, and forgiveness–in real ways, and though there’s a temptation in the end to tie things up, Efken avoids easy answers.

Would it be too cheesy to consider myself a lucky reader for stumbling on this book?

Heather A. Goodman's fiction has been published in Relief Journal, Ruminate Magazine, Generate Magazine, Mused Literary Review and Infuze Magazine (selected stories can be downloaded in their audio version at https://noisetrade.com/heatheragoodman), and her nonfiction has been published in various print and online magazines. She blogs on her website, L'Chaim, (http://heatheragoodman.com) and at The Master's Artist (http://aratus.typepad.com/tma/). She enjoys tea every afternoon and has a penchant for breaking out into song and dance. She loves wiggling her toes in sand and her fingers in a basket of yarn to be knit. And she's addicted to books.

Heather A. Goodman

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