Entrancing and disturbing ... Demick’s characters are richly drawn, and her stories, often reported over a span of years, deliver a rare emotional wallop. ... Demick is at her most coolly analytical when she writes in economic terms—including about herself ... One has the sense, reading this book, that Demick knows she is in possession of gold. It is an extraordinary yarn, the kind reporters dream about ... If there is a flaw in this excellent book it is only that the story of a single family—even, and perhaps especially, a story as dramatic as this one—is not a great vehicle for understanding Chinese family-planning policies as a whole ... Fortunately, Demick resists the impulse to tie things up in a neat bow. She leaves us uncertain about who is better off—the twin raised in China or the girl who grew up in Texas. That sense of uneasiness, born of an impossible desire for something whole, is a hallmark of Demick’s work.
International adoptions, which China banned in 2024, are a tricky subject to write about ... But Demick—whose previous books include Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, which won the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction in 2010—has written with impeccable empathy for everyone involved, Chinese and western. Despite the author’s limited Chinese, she captures the essence of rural Chinese society in a way few western observers have done, while her portrait of Americans very different to herself—at one point, she admits that the Bible Belt was more foreign to her, as a coastal American, than Asia—is sensitive and sympathetic.
Demick tells [these] stories with amazing levels of detail, nuance, empathy, and grace. She includes meticulous documentation and offers unique insights into life in rural China from the Maoist regime to the present day.
