“The Earthquake Child is a clear-eyed look at the most complicated of family lives,
bound tightly by loyalty and ineradicable love.”
— Susan Straight, National Book Award Finalist and author of Mecca, In the Country of Women and Highwire Moon
The Earthquake Child
A new Novel out Now
The Earthquake Child, a story of adoption, is told through the voices of an adoptee, his desperate young birth mother, and his loving, yet grieving adoptive mother. How can Joshua’s behavior be explained? This question is the all-consuming one of nature versus nurture. Relinquished at birth, Joshua was adopted only days later. Was it the genetic inheritance of substance abuse and generational poverty? Was it the losses he experiences in the adoptive family? Or, was it the very fact of adoption itself—the trauma of being amputated from the gestational mother to be raised by a family unrelated to the child by blood, culture or biology? What makes our children who they are? These voices and questions will resonate with all parents, but particularly those who are or have been part of the adoption triangle: adoptees, mothers who have relinquished a child or parents who’ve added a child to their family through adoption.