I don't often hold much hope for novels written about the birth parent experience. Fiction leaves room for exaggeration and personal opinion and so I try to go into reading with an open mind. My mind was blown by B-Mother by Maureen O'Brien (2007). While, in the end, some loose ends tie up too neatly, I think this is one of the best fictional books I've read on adoption and the birth parent experience.

The main character, Hillary, finds herself pregnant at the beginning of her junior year of high school (1981). Only sixteen years of age, she is familiar with grief and loss as her older brother died during an unfortunate hazing event in college four years prior. Her parents, still overwhelmed with the loss of a child, send her off to a maternity home -slash- convent to spend the duration of her pregnancy.

Hillary is able to search through profiles and choose the parents for her unborn child. The descriptions of the actual process during this time and her accompanying emotions are superbly spot-on, sadly so. While the social worker tells her that she isn't being forced to place, no parenting options are ever provided. Instead, she's given profile after profile with sickeningly sweet letters addressed, inappropriately, to the "birthmother."

Most heart-wrenching was the description of the physical relinquishment of her son. Vivid in description and heavy in emotion, the author makes the reader see and feel the depth of the moment. For those who have actually placed a child for adoption, this particular point at the end of part one might be somewhat overwhelming. Others may find it surprising, enlightening or saddening. In my readings thus far, I find it to hit some more real spots of the exchange, above and beyond what other books have accomplished.

This part, just as Hillary is leaving the hospital, struck me. Deeply.

I knew he was Lola's now. I began kissing Tom's sleeping face. He yawned. I kissed him again and again and again. He sighed and kept dozing. "This isn't goodbye," I sobbed. I lifted him up, and placed him into Lola's long, spotted arms.

It happens all the time.

I grabbed the big blue balloon from the wheelchair, snapped it off, and began to run, sore nipples chafing, swear pouring, legs buckling under me. Shell and I squealed out of the parking lot, tires laying a long hot patch. I needed a quick getaway, as if I were a criminal.

We then follow Hillary through her grief process, which friends and family don't seem to understand. The parents she chose for her son keep their promise and send pictures and letters every year on his birthday. Hillary goes off to college and faces the choices of whether or not to share her role as a birth mother with those closest to her. Those choices follow her as she heads off to start her own life after college. The fears described as she weighs the decision each time speak true to what many birth mothers experience.

The book picks up again when her son reaches the age of eighteen and sends a letter. After some back-and-forth writing, they decide to meet in person. Things, happily, go well. However, that doesn't mean that some of these meetings aren't fraught with heavy questions and emotional exchanges. While I am not a birth mother from the closed era and thus have no experience with reunion, I can imagine that some of the questions she is asked by her son are quite common. I also found this particular section, though much more fast-paced than any other reunion I've ever heard or read about, to be mostly realistic.

The book ends with an exchange between mothers that warmed my heart. This, of course, may be the most far-fetched aspect of the book. While the exchange of letters and pictures may place this adoption into the realms of openness for some people, the truth remains that this was a closed adoption. For the mothers to get along so well, so quickly is a bit of a stretch even though Hillary did choose her son's parents. It was nice to read, of course, but not incredibly realistic.

All in all, I loved this book. I read it in two short days. Knowing that she would relinquish her child, I read quickly through the end of part one. At that point, I had to put the book down for the rest of the evening. I was emotionally spent. However, after a good night's sleep, I picked the book up the next morning and read it through the end. (Or, you know, read it through the end with appropriately timed interruptions from husbands and children.) I would recommend this book to anyone searching for a good novel. Do beware that there are issues of adoption (obviously), drug use, death, grief, unethical adoption practices, sex (not graphic, just issues dealing with sex), and other inter-relational problems that others might find triggering.

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For more book reviews, read:

1. Lifegivers: A Wrap-Up - August/September 2007.

2. Girls in Trouble - July 2007.

3. Second Chance Mom - June 2007.

4. The Bad Mother's Handbook - May 2007.

5. The Mistress's Daughter - April 2007.

6. Somebody's Daughter - March 2007.

7. The Girls - February 2007.

8. Singing Bird - January 2007.

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Photo Credit: Book Cover taken by Jenna Hatfield.