For much of her life, Dawn has felt as if something had been missing. Now, at the age of fifty-eight, with a divorce behind her and her two grown-up sons busy with their own lives, she should be trying to settle into a new future for herself. But she keeps returning to the past and to the secret she's kept all these years: at just sixteen, Dawn found herself pregnant, and—as was common in Trinidad back then—her parents sent her away to have the baby and give her up for adoption. More than forty years later, Dawn yearns to reconnect with her lost daughter. But tracking down her child is not as easy as she had thought.
Every bit as alive and convincing as Golden Child [Adam's debut] ... A situation rich with logistical and emotional possibilities, all of which Adam mines with subtlety and finesse. What could all too easily have been a straightforward case of will-she-won’t-she find her long-lost child is somehow both more mundane and more unsettling ... The final pages...are as gripping as any thriller, and the ending, when it comes, feels as right as it is devastating.
Never drifts. Each new memory has a weight; it shifts the balance of the narrative, reconfiguring the relationship between the events that precede it. This isn’t a confession but a reassembly, a story that evolves as the narrator tries to sort through it in her mind.
Adam is a thoughtful writer and this is a soulful, unflashy narrative ... Love Forms does not have the same propulsive quality as the kidnap narrative of Golden Child, but it’s a reflective novel that sensitively explores love and motherhood.
