The first third of the book lays the historical and contextual groundwork for China's One Child policy, and for the personal story that follows. The history is important, and needs to be told, but the delivery is a bit dry and dismal. It leads into the impact on individuals, families, and culture of both China and those who adopted the children in good faith, and this writing is more gripping. The author has written it as the reporter that she is.

Daughters of the Bamboo Grove is an eye-opening, fascinating, and damning indictment of China’s “one child” policy that was in effect from 1979 – 2015. Journalist and author, Barbara Demick deploys one family’s tragic interaction with the system in China’s southern Hunan province to examine the social, cultural, economic, and demographic effects of the restrictive law. The “daughters” in the title are monozygotic twin girls who were separated as infants. One was adopted by a Christian evangelical family from Texas when she was a toddler while her sister remained with their birth family in China. With Demick’s connections and language skills (she spent seven years as Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times), the twins were eventually reunited in their late teens. The book takes an unflinching look at the blow back from the Christian evangelical fervor that caused many couples and individuals from the United States and Europe to “rescue” babies from China. These infants and toddlers were in reality being trafficked as part of a very lucrative international adoption nexus. Demick also explores the problems inherent in twin studies, the demographic sequelae of China’s preference for boys and the new developments possible with forensic DNA analysis.

Demick’s use of primary sources as well as her many interviews and first-hand knowledge of the Chinese countryside makes for a reliable, relatable and highly engaging reading experience.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for this ARC in exchange for my review.

Daughters of the Bamboo Grove, by Barbara Demick, is an unforgettable account of China’s disastrous one-child policy told through the experience of FangFang and her twin sister Shuangjie. In well-written and documented personal accounts, Demick gives us a story of shocking government corruption and deception that resulted in families ripped apart and babies that became a commodity. Foreigners who thought they were helping save baby girls abandoned by their parents were actually adopting babies that had been kidnapped by baby-snatchers in collusion with communist party bureaucrats and government-run orphanages. The one-child policy disproportionately impacted China’s rural population who were largely illiterate, living in villages that lacked access to news, legal systems, and transportation. It was easy to get away with baby-snatching, with little or no recourse left to the victims’ families.

Demick's impeccable reporting is rich with primary sources, first-person interviews, and personal experiences. Her account doesn’t hide the moral dilemma of reuniting kidnapped children with their birth families and her sensitivity to all parties involved is ever-present. Her reporting lifts a corner of the "red curtain" that shrouds Communist China, revealing a policy that continues to negatively impact a country too proud to acknowledged it made a mistake.

I only wish the book had a glossary of the family names. As an English reader unfamiliar with Chinese language, it was hard to keep some of the names straight without a cheat sheet.