Adopted Miracles – A Book Review and a Giveaway (International)

I am on a non-fiction run, it seems. It’s rare that I read so many non-fiction in a single month, but all these books have been so different from each other that I haven’t found it monotonous at all.

Adopted Miracles by Anamika Mukherjee is a book about her and her husband’s experiences with infertility, their consequent decision to adopt, and how they went about the adoption process. Along the way, she chronicles their emotional highs and lows, their uncertainties and fears, and the legal adoption process.

A Little Background to this Book

You are going to have to excuse my gushing over this book. I’ve been super-excited about reading this book for ages because of the following reasons:

• The author is a close friend of mine, and I’ve heard bits and pieces about the status of this book for the past couple of years. So, obviously, I am excited to read the end product of all her hard work.
• Her two daughters – the adopted children at the heart of this book are close friends of Snubnose too.

So you can imagine the excitement in our house when this book came home. There was a lot of squealing from Snubnose as she speed-read through the pages to see her friends names in print. Although this is a totally adult book, I had to fight Snubnose to read this book (and answer a lot of questions as well 😀 ) and ended up reading the book late at night after Snubnose was asleep 🙁 .

Onto the Review

This is a fantastic book and I loved it totally. The book gets it perfectly right with the right blend of honesty, discretion, and emotion.

And when I mean honesty, I mean this:

There may be people who hold their adopted babies for the very first time and know right away that this is their baby. I am not one of them. I looked at the twins and I knew that they were somebody else’s babies.

and towards the end of the book where Anamika admits:

The hurt and disappointment of not ever having been pregnant still lingered in unexpected corners of my heart.

As you can see, this is a book from the heart.

The sections where she candidly comments how awful she felt about hearing another woman’s pregnancy news when she was unable to share any news from her side would ring true, I think, for any couple battling infertility.

Technically, this is a book on adoption, she really didn’t have to explain the hows and whys and the reasons why she went down the adoption road. But, I am glad she did. It really forms the heart of the book.

I also loved the openness with which she talks about the social issues that she faced once she adopted her twins. Adoption in India is still a tricky affair where people either ask too many questions (that can be hurtful), or ask too few questions (that can come across as uninterested).

So, I love it that Anamika has the courage to just tell it like it is. There are plenty of resources on adoption but either they originate from the West or they are too textbook-ish in nature to appeal. This book does a nice job straddling the line between personal thoughts and feelings and the nitty-gritty quasi-legal details about adoption in India.

What it also does is debunk a lot of false ideas that people have about adoption.

Recently, a couple came to me and told me they wanted to adopt a child – possibly 3 to 6 months old. Based on what I knew about adoption from speaking to Anamika, I could see that their expectations were quite unrealistic. Now that this book is out, I can point this book to them as a resource they can use to get their expectations in order.

This is a must-read book especially for people considering adoption or battling infertility.

However, more than just a book about children and the lack of it, it’s really a book about having a dream and working towards it, and being flexible about the path that you take towards that dream. And I think that’s as universal as a book can get.

And a Giveaway

I received a review copy of this book from Harper Collins Publishers in exchange for an honest review. However, I have another personally bought copy as well to give away to interested readers.

So, fill up the Rafflecopter letting me know you want to read this book. I”ll select one lucky winner using a Random Number Generator on June 06. This giveaway is worldwide.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Good luck!