A bitter-sweet novel about a woman's quest to find the daughter she bore in Venezuela, at age 1`6, a daughter who was taken from her at birth by nuns and adopted by unknown persons. Dawn spends her life trying to find the child again, even after marrying and having other children.

I enjoyed learning more about the political history and life in the islands of Trinidad and Tobago, where much of the story takes place, and about their proximity to Venezuela, only seven miles away. The islands are a major part of the story, and form a unique setting.

The book follows how Dawn comes to terms with the future and the possibility of ever finding her daughter again.

I wanted to love this book but it left me confused. I felt like I was reading a "dear diary" sort of story and a "welcome to Trinidad and Tobago" brochure mixed with the character's race and class in society. It felt disjointed. The constant explanation of Trinidadian culture competed with the story about a mothers love for her children and her place within her family and upkeeping their reputation. These narratives could have been more cohesive but it instead, it was distracting.

This beautifully written novel follows Dawn, a woman at a crossroads, navigating the emotional aftermath of a life shaped by silence, sacrifice, and longing. At fifty-eight, with her children grown and her marriage behind her, Dawn turns inward—toward the secret she’s held for over four decades: the child she was forced to give up as a teenager in Trinidad.

What follows is a moving, profoundly human story of one woman’s search for healing. From the sun-soaked streets of Trinidad to the bustling landscapes of Venezuela and London, the novel captures the complexity of memory and the ache of what-ifs. Dawn’s journey is not just physical—it’s a reckoning with all the choices, regrets, and quiet hopes that have shaped her.

The strength of this book lies in its emotional honesty. Dawn is neither a hero nor a victim—honest, flawed, and brave in her vulnerability. Her longing to reconnect with her lost daughter is rendered with tenderness and nuance, making her story feel intimate and universal.

This novel is about the ties that bind us across time, distance, and pain. It is about love—imperfect, enduring, and transformative. Powerful, reflective, and quietly devastating, this book will stay with you long after the final page.

The publisher provided ARC via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Sixteen-year-old Dawn escapes to Venezuela to give birth and give the baby up for adoption. Now at 58 she's living in England with two adult sons. Then she receives a mysterious letter....This is a thoughtful and tender novel about what we will do to preserve our integrity and family as Adam says, "to remember the past is its own gift".
Thanks to NetGalley for this ARC!

Ever since reading Golden Child, i've been eagerly awaiting for another book from Claire Adam. This one did not disappoint. I thoroughly enjoyed this one and think its another great summer read.

Nail biting keep you on your toes type of read I loved it and would like to experience this read for another time informative thank you

3.5 stars rounded up.
This book felt like my own grandmother telling me a story about her past. The book piqued my curiosity when Dawn was taken to the women's home to give birth to her baby. This was an experience I wish the author had spent more time on; however, the way it is recalled demonstrates how sometimes it is hard to remember traumatic situations. The lack of resolution at the end of the book was disappointing but it also felt realistic to many adoptee stories.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for this digital ARC!

"... it does seem to me now, as I get older, that to remember the past is its own gift: to be able to return to those past moments--the sorrows and joys--and relive them, even the ones that we don't properly understand."

At 58, Dawn is settled into her post-divorce life; worrying about her two adult sons, seeing her friends, seeing her "friend", working at her menial job after giving up her medical career early on when the boys were young. But when Dawn was 16 and living in Trinidad, she gave birth to a baby girl who was given up for adoption. While the girl has never been far from Dawn's thoughts, Dawn now finds that she has too much time to devote to this mysterious daughter; who is she, where is she living, how did she grow up, is she happy? With the popularity of DNA ancestry sites, Dawn has been scouring message boards for years. She receives yet another message from yet another potential daughter, and her hope rises. Love Forms follows Dawn through her memories of living in Trinidad, of giving the baby up in secret in Venezuela, of her current life in London, of messaging with the hopeful woman as they navigate their possible relationship.

A book filled with what ifs, something like regret but also just a yearning for what could have been and not necessarily what would have been. Reflecting on life, how it's turned out, how things could have been different. A slow-paced novel with a stirring ending.

Love Forms by Claire Adam is the kind of novel that sneaks up on you quietly and then refuses to let go. Dawn is fifty-eight, newly divorced, and technically free to start a new chapter, except her mind keeps pulling her backward to the secret that shaped everything. At sixteen, she had a baby in Trinidad and gave her up for adoption under pressure from parents who treated shame like a family heirloom. Now, decades later, she wants answers. She wants connection. She wants to fill the hollow space she’s been carrying around for most of her life.

What makes this book hit so hard is how real Dawn feels. She’s messy and restless and unsure, cycling through guilt, hope, fear, and regret with the kind of quiet desperation that feels almost too intimate to watch. Her journey to find her daughter takes her from Trinidad to Venezuela to London, but the real journey is internal, forcing her to confront not just one painful decision but every choice that has added up to her current loneliness.

Claire Adam doesn’t lean on melodrama to make you care. She trusts the small moments…the half-remembered conversations, the uneasy family dynamics, the ache of what’s been lost and can never fully be recovered. There’s so much empathy in the way she writes Dawn, never excusing her choices but always making them understandable. Love here isn’t clean or simple, but it’s stubborn. It endures even when every practical thing says it shouldn’t.

Love Forms is a slow, stirring, beautifully honest novel about the ways we break our own hearts trying to do what’s right, and the stubborn, breathtaking hope that it’s never too late to try to fix what’s been broken.

The writing was flat, I didn't connect or feel any emotion. I also found it hard to trust the author when she described the character having posters of Duran Duran, A-Ha and Bon Jovi on her bedroom wall, and then saying it was November 1980. It's such an easy thing to look up - none of those bands had released any albums in 1980. Hopefully this will be fixed before publication.

The writing and I just didn’t jive in this one for me, a bit too much telling with very little showing.

The gorgeous cover initially drew me in and the story being set in Trinidad and Venezuela was very intriguing I just wish I connected more to the prose.

A simple case of me not you.

I will admit that I 100% chose to request this ARC based on it's cover—which I think is beautiful. I'd buy this book to have this cover on my shelf.

Love Forms begins with Dawn Bishop, a rich white 16 year old living in Trinidad, is sent away to Venezuela to temporarily live with nuns until she gives birth, with the child being given up for adoption. We then follow the meandering turns of Dawn's life into her adulthood—now 58, divorced with two fully-grown sons living their own lives, and completely lost without a sense of self. She yearns to find her lost daughter as well as a way to move forward with her adult life, unable to settle into a future while stuck on the mystery of her past.

This book was vibrant and beautiful, and a love letter to Trinidad—the author was born on the island and now lives in England, much like Dawn. The slower, meandering pace of the story made it hard for me personally to get through the book, but I usually love a good slice of life book. Looking forward to reading more from this author!

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The writing in this deeply emotional novel is beautiful and I kept turning the pages to see if Dawn was reunited with the daughter she unwillingly gave up for adoption 40+ years ago. No spoilers, sorry!

I am deducting a few stars (although I would give it 3.5 stars if I could) because 2/3 of the book read like a memoir/travel book to me. I found myself skimming through the parts about her home country and all her relatives there (except for her parents). There was too much about the history of her country that I didn't feel was relevant to the story of her finding her daughter.

Thanks to NetGalley, the author, and publisher, for an Advanced Reading Copy in exchange for my honest review.

Dawn is a 58-year-old divorced mother of two adult sons, living in London, trying to settle into a nice middle aged life. A native of Trinidad with roots and family still back home, both kids flown with careers, and a decent relationship with her ex-husband and a job that she doesn’t love, but pays the bills, one would imagine she is indeed well set for a good future on her own.

However, Dawn has a secret. She’d made a pact with her parents to not speak about an event that happened 42 years ago. A traumatic time for Dawn and her family, particularly given the closeknit and small island community.

At the age of 16, Dawn had given birth to a baby girl. And given it up for adoption. Dawn had been the baby of the family, a studious young girl, from a well to do, respected family. An uncharacteristically careless decision made during island carnival set her on this unexpected path. Over 40 years later, she has an emptiness in her, a longing to find her long lost daughter. She has been trying to track down the baby that she gave away so many years ago. She is haunted by the memories of that time, and this need to connect with her long-lost daughter.

I loved this story. Dawn is a super-relatable character, the descriptions of her daily life and her thoughts, how she deals with her co-workers, her kids, her family and her reflections on life - I empathized with her on so many levels. Perhaps it’s because I am at a similar time of life, middle aged woman, looking at the future ahead of me and all those life considerations. I appreciated the first-person perspective, written like a memoir. There was so much groundedness in the description of her daily life. When she described the interactions with her family and complex relationships with siblings and her parents – I understood. The island life also sounded so vivid, and the author writes of it, and about the characters, with affection.
But it is when she describes the events of her time at 16 years of age, and later during her search for her daughter (who would now be in her early 40s) that the novel is elevated to a heartbreaking level. The last passages were especially poignant and brought me to tears.
I love Claire Adam’s style of writing and have already set my sights on reading her first novel Golden Child (which apparently, I put on my to-read list about 6 years ago and totally forgot about.)

Thank you to Random House and the author for an advanced reader copy for an honest review.

A very solid 4, if not 4.5.

Love Forms tells us the story of Dawn Bishop, a recently divorced 58 years old woman, mother of two, from Trinidad, living in England and learning to live on her own. At 16, Dawn gets pregnant from a stranger during Carnaval and gets sent away to Venezuela to have her baby. Common at the time, everything is kept a secret, the baby gets put up for adoption, and life goes on as if nothing ever happened. But not for Dawn, which after all these years, hopes to reconnect with her daughter.

I picked up this book in my flight back to Seattle after spending the holidays with my complicated but loving Mexican family, not expecting to have a retrospective session on the plane. With a strong first half, the writing feels personal, not as if it was my mom telling me the story, but -a- mother. The descriptions of Trinidad were absolutely lovely and feel authentic, and I really appreciated the descriptions of the socio-political context across the years.

Love Forms made me reflect on my own humanity, the relationship with my own mother and family, and how love shows up. In the end, Love Forms is an emotive story about love - to home, and to family.

3.5 stars rounded up to 4. Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for the chance to read this.

The plot really drives the narrative in Love Forms--I was enamored with Dawn's plight to track down her daughter and discover some long-awaited closure. I found it difficult to really connect to any of the characters beyond Dawn though. It read as almost a fictionalized memoir in certain spots, which both added and subtracted from the emotional impact in certain areas. The writing itself was very to-the-point and unambiguous, which I think lent itself to the very raw emotions weaved into the story. The imagery of Trinidad and Tobago was stunning--I almost wish there was more of it. While I liked the opening of the book (dropping the reader right into the central event) the ending felt somewhat rushed and sudden. Overall, Adam handles delicate subjects such as motherhood, loss, and memory with appreciation and care.

Love Forms is a moving portrayal of what it means to be a mother and the how the decisions you are forced to make can change the course of your life.
Dawn is forced to give up her daughter for adoption and is sent away from her family in shame to give birth. She continues on with her life but is haunted by her decision as she searches for her daughter.
A large portion of the story focused on the political and social history of Trinidad and Venezuela and that was interesting. The author was beautifully able to describe the sadness and longing to uncover the truth and the difficulties accepting her loss.
Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

this book was touching ,heartbreaking, and sweet all at the same time. I enjoyed the story, I felt a lot of emotions while reading this, and the author did a good job with writing it

Thank you to NetGalley, to the author, and to the publisher for this complimentary ARC in exchange for my honest review!!!

Clocking in at just 200 pages on my tiny phone screen, this book rejects the fast pace that characterizes works of a similar length. It meanders through the life of Dawn Bishop, unhurried and uneventful. We follow her journey through teen pregnancy, conflicting national identities, and complex relationships. Normally such rich topics for exploration, they are utilized here in a way that feels neither personal nor profound. We learn so much about her, yet I depart wondering who Dawn is and what she really wants. Her voice throughout retains a distanced and matter-of-fact quality that resists interactivity.

This inner conflict is somewhat represented in the text as she searches for her missing piece, and I wished to see these themes consume more of the word count. We take a considerable time to describe the political, social, and relational conditions that would've developed in a longer novel, but weren't optimized for this story. Love Forms is a love letter to Trinidad with little obligation to be anything else.

Thank you to Random House for the e-ARC.

Love Forms is an intricate, multi-layered exploration of human connection and the nuances of love, both romantic and familial. Known for her evocative prose, Adam dives into the complexities of relationships, particularly in the context of cultural identity and personal growth. While it doesn’t have the same raw intensity as her debut novel, Golden Child, this book is a testament to her ability to weave heartfelt stories with profound insight.

The novel follows a cast of characters whose lives intersect in surprising and often poignant ways, with each narrative thread offering a unique perspective on love’s many forms—desire, loss, duty, and redemption. Adam’s Trinidadian roots subtly permeate the narrative, adding layers of richness and authenticity. The setting feels alive, a quiet but powerful backdrop to the characters’ emotional journeys.

One of the book’s greatest strengths is Adam’s ability to write characters that feel deeply real. Their flaws, vulnerabilities, and decisions are relatable, even if sometimes frustrating. However, some readers may find the pacing uneven, particularly in the middle sections, where certain subplots meander before finding resolution. Additionally, while the themes are universal, the fragmented storytelling style may not resonate with everyone, leaving some plotlines feeling less developed than others.

Ultimately, Love Forms is a reflective and intimate read that invites readers to examine their own relationships and the ways love manifests in their lives. While it doesn’t quite reach the narrative heights of Golden Child, it is a compelling exploration of the human heart that will linger with you long after you’ve turned the final page. For fans of character-driven stories with emotional depth, it’s well worth a read.