Kirkus Review
Poet and novelist Kay (Creative Writing/Newcastle Univ.; The Lamplighter, 2009, etc.) recalls growing up black in a white adoptive family and the journey that reunited her with her birth parents.Immediately after her birth in 1961, the author, the love-child of a Scottish nurse and a Nigerian student, was put up for adoption. Two Glaswegians with communist leanings, John and Helen Kay, brought her into their home a few weeks later to keep the first "coloured child" they had adopted, Maxwell, company. Despite the inevitable prejudice she encountered in her largely segregated environment, the life she shared with her unconventional "mum and dad" was happy, and she grew up comfortable in her own skin. But like most adopted children, she began to wonder about her real parents, creating elaborate fantasies about a beautiful mother who had been madly in love with a father she imagined as "a handsome cross between Paul Robeson and Nelson Mandela." It was only after she had reached adulthood and had given birth to her own child that Kay, prompted by questions regarding her medical history, decided to track down her parents. She finally met her mother Elizabeth, a "sad and troubled figure," in 1991. More than a decade later, through a serendipitous series of events, Kay met her father, Jonathan, an academic turned fundamentalist Christian, in Nigeria. In the comic yet wrenching first meeting that would also be their last, Jonathan ritualistically attempted to cleanse his daughter and himself of past "sins." By turns warm, funny and tender, Kay's story offers insight into the universal human quest for self-knowledge.A joyful and humane exploration of the search for belonging.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Scottish poet and writer Kay is seven years old in 1969 when it first dawns on her to ask why she and her mum have different skin colors. Her humanitarian parents are so loving and forthright, Kay easily adjusts to being adopted, but she despairs of the constant queries about where she's from (someho. Glasgow. though true, is never accepted as an answer) and suffers through racially motivated beatings and threats. Once she has a son of her own, Kay, who often felt that she wa. the only black lesbian in the world. decided to search for her biological parents. Her daunting, even surreal meetings with timorous Elizabeth of the Highlands, and Jonathan, an accomplished forestry expert and voluble, born-again Christian in Nigeria, make for poignant and hilarious scenes. Kay's complex life story is fascinating on all fronts cultural, emotional, and artistic. But it is her sparkling warmth, generous candor, depthless compassion, glinting humor, and linguistic pizzazz that make this such a stellar chronicle of a deeply personal investigative and imaginative journey, a profoundly affecting inquiry into the enigmas of self and kinship, and a celebration of transcendent goodness.--Seaman, Donn. Copyright 2010 Booklist
