Mother Mother
A married couple in California grapples with race, betrayal, love, and loss when their son comes home from a Guatemalan orphanage.
Contemporary art museum curator Julie Cowan achieves her dream of motherhood through adoption, but her life is far from perfect. Her pathologist husband, Mark, is distracted by his gorgeous, young intern, while her hotshot new museum director boss doubts Julie's curatorial chops. And Julie's six-year-old son, Jack (born Juan), may never recover from trauma inflicted by early life spent in a Guatemalan orphanage.
Then Jack suffers a major health crisis, and everything pales next to saving his life. As much as Julie clings to being Jack's "only" mother, she needs to find his Guatemalan mother to unlock his medical history. Julie hires a professional searcher, and what she learns turns her world upside down. At the same time, Jack's birth mother, an indigenous Ixil Maya, navigates her own tumultuous path, beginning with surviving a horrific massacre.
In this gripping tale told from alternating perspectives, both mothers must draw on fierce inner strength to reckon with their life choices.
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"Jessica O'Dwyer gives us a story we've never heard before--one that manages to look with compassion and authenticity and grip-your-chair dramatic tension at the subjects of infertility, marriage, adoption, and most of all, motherhood. She takes us from the world of comfortable middle-class life to the mysterious, sometimes dark and sometimes beautiful and largely unknown territory of Guatemala, and gives a kind of heroine no reader is likely to have met on the page, until now: a mother willing to do anything to save her child. You will not put this book down until you've finished, and once you have, you will not forget it. " -- Joyce Maynard, author of The Best of Us
