Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins, Barbara Demick (4.5)
China’s one-child policy is well known, but given the size of the country, the effect on the population is not as well understood. The author does a very good job following the history of several families in the countryside as they dealt with the policy. The key story is of a pair of twins born to a family who already had 2 daughters. One is abducted by the local group in charge of family planning and adopted by a US couple. There were many things I had not known: e.g. families could often have a second child if the first is a girl, families could pay a fine to the local authorities for extra children. The common belief in the US was that girl children were aborted and even killed upon birth. The author does not dispute that this happened, but she talks with many families who went to great lengths to hide and keep their girls.
Villa Coco, Andrew Sean Greer (3.0)
Cute story of a young man who takes a position to archive the treasures of a ‘Baroness’ in Italy. Nothing is as it seems for him as he drops into the crazy life of Coco. The characters are funny and unique, but the story is rather inconsequential. It does have the flavor of a small Tuscan town – spontaneous, non-linear and warm. Read it for the atmosphere, if not the plot.
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