The Red Thread by Ann Hood

This is a story about Maya Lange, a woman with a tragic past who opens The Red Thread adoption agency.  The agency places unwanted baby girls from China with American families.  The novel focuses on the families seeking adoptions, but it also includes brief stories of the birth mothers and how they came to abandon their babies.  I thought this was a very interesting concept for a book.  My favorite parts were those about the birth mothers in China.  I wish that those sections had been a larger part of the overall novel.

I was bothered by several things while reading this story.  The couples going through the adoption process were all so dysfunctional.  One woman was even ashamed of her disabled daughter and wanting to adopt so that she could have a normal child.  Maya seemed to feel that having a baby would somehow fix these people, and she at times pushed reluctant people with the idea that they would come around.  I didn't want to see any of these people get a baby, and I was disappointed in Maya for moving forward with the couples.

I think this could have been a very good book if a few of the couples had been likable. The stories set in China were very good, but too few and far between.  The character of Susannah, the mother of the disabled child, probably ruined my enjoyment of the book the most.  I'd rate this one a 2.5/5.