As a mother who adopted an abandoned child from a third-world country, and who often wishes his biological mother could see what a wonderful person he is, I found this well-written novel engaging and moving. The two stories, one of a white American who becomes a mother through adoption, and the other, an impoverished indigenous Ixil Maya woman who gives birth to a son, are interwoven to tell their different (and yet same) stories of the power of motherhood. Recommended.

As an adoptive mother, this is a must read! The storytelling took me right back to those emotions in such a beautiful and powerful way. Not an adoptive parent - then this must read is a peek behind the curtain, so to speak!

The story of the adoption of a Guatemalan boy. Though the parents expected to bring the child back with him as a baby, it took two years of paperwork before he was released into there custody.

Mother, Mother is the story of 2 mothers, the adoptive and the birth mothers, of Jack (born Juan). It’s the story of an international adoption from Guatemala during a turbulent time and touches on many issues: shady adoptions, ethics, adoption breakdown, interracial adoption, prejudice (against children of colour and of adopted children), and the ins and outs of adoption.

As an adoptive parent myself I was anxious to read this book and I did enjoy it. However, I felt I needed some time to digest it after reading. There are so many issues brought up and so many emotions.

I love that the book alternates point of view to include the birth mother’s experience. And the political environment and some of the unethical adoption practices of Guatemala was also an important part.
This book was certainly heartfelt and had the feeling of a memoir from Julie’s point of view at times – she’s the American adoptive parent. I liked her and felt for her and my heart certainly went out to her when people made thoughtless or “well meaning” comments about adoption, fertility, or her son.

However, the novel also felt a little disjointed to me. Maybe it was trying to cover too much and needed a bit more focus? Maybe it was the pacing? I’m not sure.

Either way, this is an interesting and compelling book about international adoption, both from the perspective of a birth mother and an adoptive mother, and it has some interesting commentary on how society views adoption and adoptive children.

And, for the record, adoption is not second best. Adoptive children are our children. We love them the same as birth children. Birth parents are parents too. Adoptive parents are real parents.
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Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the review copy.

This story captivated me from the very beginning. I felt like every sentence was carefully written, and I loved the deep meaning behind the overall story. I will be reading future books from this author.

This was a very thoughtfully and well written book focusing on adoption from Guatemala to USA and the impacts this has on all relationships and people involved. I found the elements written from the Guatemalan perspective detailing the frictions within the country difficult to read and wasn't expecting such challenging and upsetting material although it is obviously important to understand to give the story balance.
I enjoyed reading this and felt very connected to the main characters of Jack and his US mother.

A thank you to NetGalley for sharing the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

With several international adoptions enriching my amazing family, I'm naturally drawn to books on the subject. Prior to this all of my reads thus far have fallen into the Nonfiction category - at least as I what I can recall. And, while I'm also always a bit uncomfortable with stories that juxtapose the 'haves' and the 'have-nots' when written from the perspective by an author that falls into the former category. However, I did love that fact that it was written by a woman that authored the book based on her experience. As such, it's though-provoking and does beg the question - how much is fact and how much is fiction. Literarily speaking, it's evident that the author is a first time novelist, but that's not a criticism, or does it detract from the touching and heartfelt read.

Staggering in its accuracy and honesty. Highly recommend to anyone touched by adoption. As adoptive mother of Guatemalan children, this beautifully captures the ongoing angst about how best to help our children find their way in life as part of a culture they were not born into.

When Julie and Mark embark on adopting a baby from Guatemala, they have no idea of the challenges they will face. After an initial adoption falls through, they are matched with an infant boy. Bureaucracy, red tape, and the closing down of adoptions from Guatemala, however, means that years pass before Juan Rolando is officially adopted and comes to live with them in San Francisco. For four years, they fly back and forth, visiting him in the confines of a hotel for a few days at a time, attempting to bond with a child they hardly know. After their adoption is finally completed and Juan Rolando is officially their son and an American citizen, Mark and Julie hire a searcher to find Juan’s (who has renamed himself Jack) birth mother, hoping to fill in the gaps of his health and medical chart. The search instead reveals that Jack’s biological mother is not the woman they were told and that his documents were forged. This is a secret that Mark and Julie keep to themselves, unsure whether or not Jack was an infant given up voluntarily or purchased from his mother by manipulation.

The story focuses primarily on Julie who has a successful job at a small art gallery although she is turned down for a promotion early on in the book. O’Dwyer does well at portraying the tension between Julie’s career and her goals in the art world versus her role as a mother. Mark is a doctor, a research scientist, whose job adapts very little to his new role as a father whereas Julie is the driving force behind their adoption, reworking her days and her career around her role as Jack’s mother. It isn’t hard to see the fractures in their marriage growing.

The book covers quite a bit of time, around a decade, and moves forward quite quickly through the characters’ lives. Toward the end, after a major reveal, we jump forward a whole year and are told only through exposition what the fallout of that reveal has been. While this provides a wide-ranging view of this family and the many facets of adoption, it also made me feel distant from the characters and made it more difficult to sympathize with them. I never felt like I really understood Julie or her motivations and so I never particularly cared what happened to any of them.

O’Dwyer’s bio tells us that she is the mother of two children, adopted from Guatemala. So I have to assume she knows what she’s writing about. The world of international adoption is well outside my realm of expertise and I have no trouble believing that it is a long and painful and expensive road to travel to parenthood. I think international and cross-cultural adoption is a complicated and complex topic. Some of that is touched on in Mother Mother but it was never clear to me what Julie’s own feelings were and whether or not I was supposed to view her as the villain or the hero of the story.

Julie loves her son wholeheartedly. When she befriends another adoptive mother, she is horrified when that mother eventually rehomes her two daughters. At the same time, Julie learns that there is a very real chance her son was either kidnapped or taken from his family under false premises and she and her husband choose to keep this a secret, never investigating further. As well, they make very little effort to keep their son connected to his Guatemalan heritage. While still undergoing the process of adoption and visiting him in Guatemala, they learn Spanish but make no effort to keep it up when he arrives in the US or to encourage him to maintain his first language. They never take him to visit Guatemala or attempt to connect him with Guatemalan-Americans. There is one scene where they take him to a Guatemala restaurant. Later, they attend a camp for families with children adopted from Latin-American countries, which is nice but run entirely by white folks so not at all the same as helping him maintain his connection to his heritage. When Juan, surrounded by white children at school, wants to change his name to Jack, they never even discuss it with him or encourage him to retain his birth name.

Intersecting with all this however is the story of a young woman named Rosalba. Through her we learn more about the long and vicious civil war in Guatemala. We are given a glimpse of the poverty and struggle of a Guatemala woman and how she might end up in the position of giving away a child. While I would have liked to spend more time with Rosalba, I appreciated the nuance this gave the story and the glimpse it provided of Guatemala itself.

As I said, adoption is complicated and international adoption probably even more so. I don’t feel like I’m in a position to comment on the rights or wrongs of it and, as a parent, I can’t imagine the pain and struggle faced by mothers both biological and adoptive. Overall, I would have liked Mother Mother to take me deeper into the emotional territory of it all when, instead, I felt like I was skimming over the surface. This is a book that feels like one I should have cried over but instead found myself not feeling particularly emotional at all. O’Dwyer has also written a non-fiction memoir about her own experience of adoption and I’m interested now to see what her perspective there might be.

It's obvious that this work of fiction is written with personal experience and inside knowledge on the experience adoption from Guatemala. The author describes the difficulties associated with finalizing an international adoption, bringing a child into a foreign place, and adjusting as a family to the numerous challenges this brings. She describes the impacts that adoption has on every facet of life, including marriage and extended family.

We also hear the story of the birth mother - the tumultuous circumstances that led to her being a mother, one in which no one would blame her for placing her child into adoption.

Overall, adoption is a difficult situation for all who are involved. The adoptive child is separated from his/her birth parent yet expected to adjust and be grateful for a new life. The adoptive parents are helping a child find a stable and loving home, yet can never compete with the biological parent and may always feel inadequate.

This story is well-written, fast-paced, and brings to light many issues that people who have not gone through the adoption process would not be aware of. The book also provides a lot of detail about the armed conflicts and turbulent past of Guatemala.

Thanks to Netgalley for this ARC.

Mother Mother is an emotional, gripping tale of two mothers, thousands of miles apart and how their paths get intertwined in the process of seeking motherhood.Julie and Mark make their minds to adopt a child from Guatemala country through an international adoption program, after years of trying to conceive one. In the process they spend several years for approval of paperwork, along with many other American parents, entangled in the country's rigid and corrupt constitutional laws, only to find the programs shut down mid-way. Meanwhile, their son Juan gets shifted from foster care to an orphanage with harrowing ministrations that traumatizes him at such a delicate age. Only when Julie loses all hope she surprisingly receives the approbation of the paperwork regarding their son's adoption. But this only marks the beginning of the struggle Julie encounters in the path to becoming a mother. As Julie tries to give a home to Juan, he struggles to adjust in a white society, in a perfect family and constantly fears loss due to the trauma inflicted upon him during his orphanage days. And in turn giving a challenge to Julie to constantly evolve as a mother and adapt to Juan's world. She tries every possible way to love and care for Juan and above all to let Juan know that he is loved. On the other hand we are narrated the tumultuous journey of Juan's birth mother in the Guatemalan country along with a detailed description of the country's civil war and its harrowing repercussions. Her story highlights the beauty and pain in the struggle of a mother giving away her child for a better upbringing thus erasing prejudices related to the character of the mother.
The author has gracefully described the struggle of both the mothers. While being dragged between the envy towards Juan's birth mother and constant nagging of her boss to curate innovative ideas for her contemporary art museum, Julie discovers motherhood through an emotional and painful struggle. Rosalba after giving away her son never stops thinking, loving and praying for his well being.But will Julie get past her insecurities to get Juan educated about his homeland and his birth mother?  
Overall, this story touched so many aspects of adoption which include the struggle in the process itself, mental health of the children being adopted, racism, rehoming, orphanages, marriage and motherhood. These aspects made it feel real and heartwarming. The dual narration reasonably justified the turns that the plot took. And the ending was heavenly emotional.I devoured every single detail, emotion and was overwhelmed with this uniquely magnificent story.

Thank you Netgalley and Apprentice House Press for this ARC and Thank you to Jessica O'Dwyer for this wonderfully crafted piece.

This is a truly heart wrenching novel about international adoption told from both sides - that of the ones adopting and those putting their child up for adoption. O'Dwyer's writing is beautiful and she gives both perspectives such depth and emotion. This isn't an easy read but it's a riveting one and the ending is unforgettable.

After years of trying to have a biological baby of their own, the Cowans turn their focus to adoption, an entirely new series of heartbreak. They finally get matched with a baby in Guatemala, Juan, and they couldn’t be happier. What follows is the emotional rollercoaster of adoption and motherhood.

Told in alternating perspectives of Juan’s (now Jack’s) adoptive mother and biological mother. How Julie evolves as Jack’s adoptive mother and navigates how to best support his individual needs, and how his birth mother came to the most impossible decision.

As a mother myself, I wasn’t prepared for how this book would shred me into a million pieces. Becoming a mother changes everything, your body, your family relationships, your marriage, your career, your personhood. The story really illustrated the complexities of adoption, specifically mixed race adoption, and becoming a mother while incorporating and white privilege and racial disparity. I really loved the way the author incorporated pieces of Guatemalan culture as well. It was an incredibly emotional and powerful read.


Thank you Apprentice House Press and NetGalley for the gifted e-copy

You know how sometimes you request a book because you think you’ll quite enjoy it, but it’s not top of your list? Then you read it and you wonder why on earth it wasn’t? Yeah, that!

This is a story I hadn’t read before - a look at what it’s like to want a child so badly when you’re unable to see a pregnancy to term. This is a story of how adopting a child affects your marriage, family and lifestyle. A story of the reasons that might lead you to give up a child for adoption, and the misery it can bring. A story of a young boy, raised in a Guatemalan orphanage and suddenly thrown into life in America with a white family and trying to find his way.

This was such an eye-opener for me - not only have I had the privilege of never needing to understand the adoption system, but I also had no idea of the history of violence in Guatemala. It’s complicated, it’s brutal and it’s heartbreaking, much like this story.

This took me on an emotional rollercoaster and I’m still stunned and in awe of the way O’Dwyer tells this beautiful story of race, motherhood, love and loss.

With everything going on in our world these days, chances are you’ve not thought much about the many difficult issues surrounding adoption. But that’s the territory writer Jessica O’Dwyer has staked out for herself. It is part of her makeup as she is the mother two children adopted from Guatemala and, as such, has a lot of personal experience exploring these issues.

Her first book was the page-turning memoir Mamalita about her journey to adopt her two children. With Mother Mother, she’s turned her real-life experience into a novel.

This is the story of Julie Cowan, an upper middle class married woman from the San Francisco area who works in a small, prestigious art museum. She is invested in her career but desperately wants to be a mother and, after too many failed attempts with husband Mark, they decide to adopt.

And so begins the adoption merry-go-round, and O’Dwyer is an expert at cataloguing its heartbreaking twists and turns. Guatemala was a hotbed of adoptions for many years until the government there, realizing that perhaps many of the babies were being stolen, shut it down. Julie and Mark are trying to adopt a child during the period where the last of such adoptions are permitted and find themselves racing the calendar.

The couple is not alone and, along the way, they meet and bond with many American parents who are going through the circuitous process with many of the same emotions. No two cases, it seems, are ever exactly alike.

The Cowans’ first attempt fails, and it would make many couples turn elsewhere, but Julie and Mark carry on. Their second adoption attempt turns up a little boy named Juan whom they fall in love with. They are able to visit him in person at a central Guatemalan hotel where all the adoptive parents stay.

They buy him gifts, play with him, and do the best they can while cooped up in the hotel. The process takes years and just when it seems the legal machinations are about to go their way, Juan is transferred from a foster family to a large orphanage. It seems he might slip from their fingers but somehow, Julie and Marc are able to adopt him legally.

All the while, Julie wonders about the mother who gave Juan up. Why did she do it? Is it possible that Juan was taken from her?

This is where O’Dwyer uses a storytelling device that elevates Mother Mother. The author doesn’t merely have Julie and the reader imagine what happened. She switches gears to tell the story of how Juan came to fall into the adoption process, and it is a harrowing tale. Suffice it to say that Guatemala was, during much of its recent history, a very violent country. Its citizens are still poor and ripe for abuse.

While the book regularly delves into Juan’s ancestry, it is principally concerned with Julie’s life and how she and Marc adapt to the new child in their home. Julie Cowan recalls one of the posts another adoptive mother had written: “Our kids come with a long, slow on-ramp. Nothing happens quickly. You’ll lose friends and be alienated. . . .”

Julie finds herself feeling more and more alienated from her sister who gets pregnant very easily and seems oblivious to the tone-deaf advice she dispenses to Julie. But the toughest adjustment Julie must make is to the small boy himself.

Life is so different from Guatemala in the middle-class Cowan house that it might as well be Mars. Juan cannot conceive that Julie’s husband Mark is not just a visitor. The boy asks when the visitor will be leaving and Julie at first doesn’t understand who he means. When it dawns on her, she explains.

“Mark lives here too. He’s your dad.”
She paused to let the information sink in, then point to herself. “I’m your mom. Mommy.”

But episodes like those seem mild compared to what’s to come. Upon going to a mostly all-white school, Juan decides he wants to be called Jack and begins acting out, physically threatening Julie’s safety. He drags his fingernails across her face and attacks her with a hammer. Someone suggests Julie should send him back.

As Julie adjusts, she meets another mother who does just that. This other parent has adopted two girls from Haiti after giving birth to two sons. When one of those sons becomes sexually interested in one of the adopted girls, the mother sends the girls to another adoptive family.

It’s a heart-wrenching decision, but Julie clearly sees echoes of her own situation in that family. She decides the answer is to embrace more Guatemalan culture but, at this point, Mark is clearly no long a supporter. Mark, who up to this point has been a willing participant in Juan/Jack’s adoption, sets off on his own journey, meeting a younger woman who becomes pregnant with Mark’s child.

Author O’Dwyer shows time and again that adoption is not for the faint-hearted. Her sister may not understand and husband Mark might quit but for Julie, adoption and Juan/Jack’s well-being is all-consuming and soon, she’s off on a return trip to Guatemala where, in a twist that is conceivable though somewhat unlikely, Julie comes face to face with Juan/Jack’s biological mother Rosalba. By then, the reader is only too familiar with how and why the poor mother gave up her son.

Rosalba’s story provides insight into what the adoption process is like for the biological mothers of Guatemala who are almost too young and uneducated to know what is happening to them.

The reader can see what the mothers experience from each other’s perspectives. O’Dwyer does a compelling job of juxtaposing the adoption experience in a way that is rarely done. And will Julie have the nerve to reveal to Rosalba that her lost son is the boy Julie now calls Jack? The book seems to beg the reader for an answer to the question: What would you do?

Mother Mother is a powerful story about motherhood and Guatamalan adoption.
Julie and Mark have struggled with conception and finally decide to adopt a baby from Guatamala. But this road is not any easier. It takes YEARS before they get to bring Jack (born Juan) home. And even then, the path is still difficult, riddled with prejudice and health troubles.
This novel is told from the perspective of the birth mother and the adoptive mother. The beginning was a little slow, choppy, and disjointed. But once you connect with the characters and the story develops, we really get moving.
This novel is heart wrenching and heart warming. I would definitely recommend it, especially to anyone connected to adoption or interested in Guatemala.

*This novel is full of triggers regarding miscarriage, genocide, Guatamalan warfare, adoption trauma, and much more. Please read more reviews if this could be an issue for you. **

Thank you @netgalley @apprenticehousepress for my advanced copy for review!

Mother Mother is a touching story about the ugly and beautiful side of adoption. The author herself has personal connections to the story which makes it all the more interesting to look back on.

The story itself was incredibly touching and heartbreaking at the same time. There's a few different storylines you follow as the reader: you get to see Juan/Jack's struggle with being adopted, you see Julie and Mark struggle with the adoption process and raising an adopted son, and lastly you see Juan/Jack's birth mother and what she went through both before and after giving birth.

I loved the way this story wove between the two main storylines: Guatemala and the birth mother and California and the adoptive parents with Juan/Jack connecting the two. I also found the history of Guatemala really interesting and a good contrast to the present day.

There were a few plot points that were brought up enough to make me think they were going to go somewhere, so I was disappointed when they didn't. But overall I found this novel super interesting and captivating.

Thank you to Wild Blue Press and Netgalley for sending me an Advanced Reader Copy in return for my honest thoughts on this book.

This was a spellbinding story. I loved and hated the characters at different intervals, each one pulled at me. Written with so many complex emotions, this is not an easy read, and it's not one of those fluffy "feel good" reads either. What it is, is intense, beautiful and triumphant in many ways. I felt for Julie, the woman who wants it all- the career, the man and the child... but especially the child. The thought of adoption is scary on it's own- and still a bit taboo today. Bring another country's politics and customs into the make? It feels impossible. Then there's raising a child up that wasn't with their adoptive family from birth, trying to understand the scars of a past that you couldn't help. Family has always been important to me, and I feel like I would have many of Julie's feelings. Do you search for the birth mother? Is it better for the child? And if you find them, are you still "Mom"? How does one decide what the right thing to do here is?
On the plus side, the book had a good flow. It was beautifully written and intensely interesting. On the other hand, it's not a subject I would ever feel completely comfortable with.... and I may have wanted to slap all the adult characters at least once throughout the story. Honestly, I finished this book weeks ago and have been trying to come to terms with how I feel about it. For me, this is a four star book- It's gorgeous and I highly recommend it.... but it can hardly be considered a light or fast read.
On the adult content scale, there's violence (high levels of physical as well as sexual), language, and abuse. It's definitely not geared toward children. I would give it a seven.
I was lucky enough to receive an eARC of this book from Netgalley and Apprentice House Press in exchange for an honest review. My thanks!

“Mother Mother” is a riveting novel about two worlds thousands of miles apart and how they are intricately intertwined. Julie and her husband Mark are an affluent couple who seemingly have everything they want—except a child. They embark on adopting a baby from Guatemala, spending several long years embroiled in that country’s nightmarishly bureaucratic and corrupt system before they can finally take their traumatized son home. That’s when things become even more complicated. Meanwhile, we learn about the harrowing history of Guatemala through the testimony of their son’s birth mother, who as an infant survived a massacre and grew up in a tiny village encumbered by poverty and ongoing violence. The novel tackles difficult dilemmas about adoption and privilege head on, yet with grace and sensitivity. O’Dwyer’s exquisitely visual depictions of both worlds made me feel like I was right there—in the physical environment, and inside the hearts and minds of the two mothers. “Mother Mother” is a triumph.

Mother, Mother is a heart wrenching and captivating novel about an American woman’s tribulations of international adoption and a birth mothers difficult decision to place her child for adoption. This was such a unique, beautiful, and thoughtfully written story. Additionally, as a person who has considered the idea of adoption, this book was tremendously eye-opening. Mother, Mother is certainly one of my top books of the year and I would highly recommend reading it. I am thankful to Netgalley and the publisher for this ARC, and I look forward to reading more of Jessica O’Dwyer’s work.