The Year She Left Us: A Novel
Ma turns conventional wisdom about adoption on its head in this probing novel about a young woman adopted from China as an infant. Ari is the kind of person who is abundant in real life but largely missing from fiction: a prickly, selfish, lost girl who can hardly stand the presence of her single mother, an American of Chinese ancestry. Tormented by feelings of abandonment (“the a-word”) and chafed by her mother’s circle’s cheery attempts to connect their adopted children to “their” culture, Ari takes off. She abandons the tour group a friend is leading in China and goes off grid, with harrowing consequences. Fetched back home, she bides her time and leaves for Alaska, in search of an elusive father figure: a man who appears in a photo with Ari as a baby. Ma brings all sorts of relationships—mother-daughter, sister-sister, friend-friend—to vivid life. And she painstakingly conveys that we are never just one thing, and can never be fixed by just one formula. --Lynn Weber