Six-year-old Martha’s world changes abruptly when her mother dies during childbirth. First she must adjust to having no mother and then, when her father remarries, to a second mother. But she never stops missing her first mother, the mother she struggles to remember. Married to her college sweetheart, she anticipates motherhood. Infertility leads to another shift in plans. She and her husband enter the unfamiliar landscape of interracial and intercultural adoption. They adopt an infant son from South Korea and a daughter from Guatemala. Her children’s attitudes toward maternal loss are very different from Martha’s own. During journeys to South Korea to witness her son’s marriage and to Guatemala to vacation and volunteer with her daughter’s Mayan ancestors, she uncovers new understandings of the ties that bind, and restrain, her complicated family.
Reviewers of Missing Mothers have written:
Mesmerizing, honest, hard to put down.
Totally captivated me from the first page to the last.
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