We’ve had some heavy blogs lately, in I which expounded on how to solve some of the problems of the world. But hey, it’s summer, and everyone is talking about “beach reads”, just-for-fun summer reading. It occured to me that bestselling romance novelist Danielle Steel has dealt with adoption themes in several of her novels.
**A note about Danielle Steel’s books—in some of them, characters have sex outside of marriage. (Plenty of happily married couples star in her novels too.) I have probably read only a dozen of Steel’s more than seventy novels. As far as I can recall, we know when the characters have sex but the sex scenes are not described. But Steel writes for adults, and I can’t vouch for every book.
In Family Album,the central character forces her fourteen-year-old to release her baby for adoption. The mother-daughter relationship, obviously, is only worsened by this. (The book is about the mother’s whole life, so this is a subplot.) The girl marries an older man when she turns eighteen; however, the marriage appears to work out. The girl soon has another baby. Looking at this grandchild causes the grandmother to remember that it is not her first grandchild after all, and she apologizes to her daughter for forcing the placement.
The Gift tells the story of a young woman with an unexpected pregnancy and the way the family who will adopt her baby changes her life–and how the family is changed by the relationship with her.
Daddy features a grandfather, a father, and a son. The son is a teen-ager who tries to raise his child after his girlfriend leaves.
The novel Kaleidoscope tells a darker story of adoption and foster care. Three young girls suffer a tragedy, the murder of their mother by their father. The mother’s agent is left to decide what is to be done with the children. He arranges for the one-year-old and the four-year-old to be adopted, by different families. The eight-year-old, however, who has witnessed the murder and understandably has a “difficult personality”, ends up in foster care.
The man who placed the sisters is haunted by guilt and the need to know whether he did the right thing. He decides to get all of the sisters together. The younger sisters have not told that they are adopted, although the woman adopted at four has some vague memories of her older sister. Their being found has complications, especially for the sister who married into the French aristocracy. One unique thing about this novel is that it portrays the shock of someone who discovers that their spouse is adopted.
The two younger sisters have had loving parents and happy lives. The oldest daughter is still haunted by the trauma she has witnessed. She had been in a caretaking role for her little sisters and was further traumatized by having them taken from her. Professionally successful but personally alone, the reunion brings up all kinds of issues for her. She has a secret about her past that even the man who placed them doesn’t know.
I believe this story began in the period of the 1930s. It’s not a good view of the current adoption or foster care systems. Still its themes of childhood trauma, the effects of sibling separation, the shock of discovery, and the reunion of biological relatives make it interesting reading. One feels sympathy for nearly all of the characters, even the ones who’ve caused the most trouble.
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