Where do we really belong?

This is quite a hard book to review.  It’s basically the story of two families.  The Richardson’s are long established in Shaker Heights, both parents work, one a journalist; one a lawyer and they have four children at high school, all close in age.  The perfect American family.   Enter Mia and her daughter, Pearl.  They are itinerant travelers, having lived in 46 places in Pearl’s 15 years.  Mia is an artist, a photographer to be precise, who sells her photographs through a gallery in New York and only selling them when she needs money.  Mia rents a small duplex from the Richardson’s and gradually the Richardson children gravitate to Mia and Pearl, who are the exact opposite of their mother/family.  This book is about teenagers discovering the outside world, that other families are different from theirs and that there are other ways to be happy and satisfied in life without the traditional large house, white picket fence etc.

But more than that, I guess it’s more of a treatise on belonging.  Children feeling like they don’t belong because they are different from their siblings; Pearl never belonging because she never stays anywhere long enough to; and the main subplot of an abandoned Chinese baby which is given to the Richardson’s best friends to be adopted.  Mia knows the mother of this baby, puts two and two together and the middle section of the book is taken up with a court case as to whether the mother should get her baby back or whether she should stay with the adoptive parents (to whom does the baby belong?).

Because Mia is pro-the Chinese mother and Elena Richardson is pro-the adoptive parents, they are on opposite sides. Elena does some digging into Mia’s background and this forms a considerable section of the book.  Whilst it’s fascinating, it was such a long section that I had quite forgotten where we were in the main story-line when we jumped back in.

The book starts at the end and then jumps backwards and moves generally forwards from there although there is some jumping around in back stories.  There were lots of names thrown around in the first 30 pages or so and I had to consciously stick with it.  Once I’d got everyone sorted in my head, it got easier from there.  So just be warned it’s not an easy book to get into.

There are lots of complaints online about the ending and I agree.  There are few dreamlike musings from a couple of the characters along the lines of “wouldn’t it be great if this happened” but since there are a few of them, you know that none of them are the actual ending.  I think the author wants us to imagine our own ending and if you hate that, you have been warned!!  I struggled with the star rating, the writing is amazing although the fire imagery is a bit overdone (lots of blazing, sparks etc.), so three stars but almost 4, the one star reduction for the lack of a concrete ending.