In Claire Adam's tender second novel (after Golden Child), a middle-aged woman reflects on the trauma of being forced to surrender her baby for adoption.
Dawn, a 58-year-old divorcée from Trinidad, leads a quiet life in London. She works in real estate and keeps in touch with her adult sons as well as with her mother and brothers back home. One day, she receives an e-mail from a woman who was adopted in Venezuela in 1982 and is wondering if Dawn could be her biological mother.
"For the last forty-odd years, the story has existed only in... disconnected pieces," Dawn acknowledges; now it's time to bring it all together. When she was 16, a brief sexual encounter with a Scottish tourist during Carnival led to pregnancy. Dawn was bundled off to Venezuela--at night, wearing black, crouching in the backseat like a fugitive--to spend her final trimester in a home run by nuns, where she would leave the baby behind. Her parents refused to mention the incident afterward. But as a family reunion in Tobago approaches in the present, Dawn summons courage to face the past.
Dawn has a voice that is strongly reminiscent of Elizabeth Strout's Lucy Barton: hesitant, cogitating. It's not the first time she's faced the emotional roller coaster of a potential match. What's most important to Dawn in this slow-burning novel is not identifying her daughter but coming to terms with the psychological damage caused by her family's pact of silence. Love Forms is recommended for fans of Anne Enright and Ingrid Persaud. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader and blogger at Bookish Beck