Note: Thank you to NetGalley, Atmosphere Press, and author Deborah Jennings for the advanced reader copy of this book. This review will also be posted on NetGalley. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.

For people who are adopted, there’s no one-size-fits-all experience. For those of us who were adopted during the “baby scoop era,” it was generally a pregnant unwed mother who really didn’t have much of a choice. For Deborah Jennings, her story was quite unique.

Deborah recounts her life in this memoir. Her parents who raised her went to great lengths to hide from her that she was adopted, even concocting a story about their trip to the hospital on the day she was born. There were hints, though, that she picked up on. One of them was when studying genetics as a teen in school. Her parents had blue and green eyes and blonde hair. Deborah had dark hair and brown eyes. It made for an awkward question for her science teacher. It wasn’t until she was in her 30s, though, that she finally had the courage to ask a relative if she was adopted. She didn’t want to ask her parents due to possibly upsetting her father who had a heart condition.

This led to a search for her true background. Like me, hers was a private placement which meant there were people who knew more than they were supposed to tell. A lawyer herself, she backtracked the paperwork as much as she could. Her adoption file with social services was only given to her heavily redacted, but there were clues she could follow. What she found at the end of them was the woman who had given her up, now living in Mexico. Katie Muse had never told her parents she was pregnant, nor about the adoption until many years later. When Deborah made contact, Katie had been looking for her for a number of years already.

Learning about her biological family was a revelation for Deborah. Her parents, a former Marine in World War II who was now a police officer and his war bride from New Zealand were middle-class. Deborah didn’t really want for anything growing up, but she didn’t have the benefits that would have come with the family she was born into. Her mother’s family were wealthy Spaniards who settled in Mexico. Over the course of the book, the reader learns just how wealthy they were. Her maternal grandfather was in the diplomatic service and then published a newspaper in Virginia.

I felt like there were a lot of parallels between Deborah’s story and mine. Near the end of the book she summarizes how she feels about her life. There were certainly some things she missed out on, but overall, she thinks she was better off being adopted. I think the worst thing her parents did was try to prevent her from learning the truth. They were coming from a place of fear; that if she knew the family history and wealth she would gravitate to her biological family and forget about them. However, Katie Muse was not the maternal type. Her bohemian lifestyle had caused friction with her parents and they were largely estranged. Deborah tries to reconcile how much of this is just the way Katie is versus a trauma response to surrendering a child. I do think it was a good thing that Deborah was older and more secure about who she was as an individual when she met her birthmother. Some of the trauma that played out would have been a lot harder on someone who was less secure.

I read through Ghost Child in less than a day. It was an easy read that flowed very well. I think being adopted myself helped me relate to what she went through. I loved how she descibed Mexico and visiting there often once she knew she had family there. She also does a great job showing that no matter how wonderful your parents might be, being adopted means there’s always a sense that something is missing. More often than not, adoptees have a need to know where they come from. If Deborah hadn’t been smart enough to figure it out herself, would she have ever found out? I’m not sure. That is the biggest issue I had with her story. By not being honest they almost denied her a family history that is so amazing and rich it would have been a sin to lose out on it.