Romantic Outlaws: Wollstonecraft and her Daughter Shelley

My Book Club's March 2016 read...

Full disclosure: I'm not of fan of historical reads. Although I was hopeful as I do enjoy biographies, unfortunately I was really disappointed by this one. 

A telling of the lives of both Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley. 

Sadly, this biography was especially challenging as it is greatly lacking a critical and effective editor. The author is clearly an expert on her subject, but she gets bogged down with the details and loses the readers. I found the work seriously confusing as it jumps between the two women and jumps back and forth in time--leaving the reader to remember who all the characters are and what they were doing when the last connected chapter ended. To complicate matters, the author bores the reader to tears with endless minute details that add nothing to the overall understanding of the circumstances. It didn't help matters with half of the characters having the same name or willingly changing their names half way through their lives. (Ok, so that's not the author's fault, and I can't possibly hold her responsible for my resulting confusion on this.)

Mary Wollstonecraft:
The Rebel

Clearly, the author has spent much time reading all of the correspondence of Wollstonecraft and Shelley. I was very disappointed that her endnotes are in fact, not noted throughout the text and as such are not helpful to the reader.  Gordon has lost perspective and the ability to focus on the formative events. This weakness undermines the effectiveness of this biography.  

Mary Shelley:
Author of Frankenstein

Overall confusing and unsatisfying. Here's a example of a great 350 page work that has been diluted with an extra 300 pages of confusion and boring detail. It's in need of a serious edit and overall tightening of details.

No spoilers in this one...It's spoiled before your start. It gets one star because there is no zero star option.

Great Find: The Lost Daughters of China

Another Value Village Score!!!

While rummaging through the shelves at my local Value Village, I was lucky to find Karin Evans  account of her journey to China to adopt her daughter.  The Lost Daughters of China is the Evans' retelling of her adoption process between America and China in the late 1990's. 

Evans and her husband, unable to conceive children naturally, decide to adopt a baby girl from the Guangdong area of China. Although easy to decide that this is what she wants, her journey through the endless adoption red tape, and her far-away travels to the Peoples Republic of China shows how difficult a process this really is.

During her trip to the southern Chinese state, Evans' discovers that the One-Child policy is the tip of a very complicated social problem. The notion that male children are more valuable is ingrained in the Confusion culture for more than 1000 years. Further, this problematic policy creates such familial strife and suffering for many families who feel great pressure to produce a male child. Child abandonment is an ongoing problem that is a result of the policy that was introduced in the 1980's.

Evan's book is well written. She has done a great amount of research in preparing the context of her work. She sights academics, government studies, poems and literature. I found myself re-reading a few of such passages that were particularly touching.
 
For example, she quotes Kahlil Gibran in The Prophet: "Your children are not your children, they are not of  you, but they come through you. They are the gift of life's longing for itself."And also, a particularly beautiful excerpt from Meng Jia's poem Traveler's Song:

My loving mother, thread in hand,
Mended the coat I have on now,
Stitch by stitch, just before I left home,
Thinking that I might be gone a long time.

How can a blade of young grass
Ever repay the warmth of the spring sun?


One short coming of Evans' book is that there is an obvious absence of information about her daughter's progress in her new home country. How does her daughter feel about being adopted, and how does she cope with the feelings around being adopted? Also, she does become somewhat repetitive towards the end of the book, and I found that a little tighter editing would have been quite helpful there.

Overall this was a good read, but I would consider this only as a starting point for learning other aspects of adoption and the issues surrounding this complicated process.