This Just Read: Lucky Baby

This Just Read: Lucky Baby

Lucky Baby. A Novel. By Meredith Efken. Christian Women's Fiction. 2010.

The blurb from Meredith’s website:

All Meg Lindsay wants is to give a child the love and acceptance she wished she’d been given. When she talks her reluctant husband into adopting a Chinese orphan, she expects her dream to come true. But becoming a parent has a way of opening up painful doors from the past, and it’s all Meg can do to hold her new little family together. What started as a good intention could destroy her marriage and her family, especially if the daughter they’ve grown to love abandons them, too.

Meg’s journey is a magical one as East meets West and imagination aligns with reality. Lucky Baby takes the reader on a realistic yet mystical journey into the complexities of family life.

My take (taken from a review I did for The Writing Show’s Summer Reading club):

To be honest, I thought I would love the writing of this book but not be too crazy about the message behind it. That is to say, I thought it would be all "look at our fairy tale ending, we're so glad we adopted, you should, too, it's always the best choice, forget about the birth mother" in a very well told novel.

You have to keep in mind, my own WIP is about the other side of adoption- what happens to a woman forced to give up her child. I’ve read so much *adoption propaganda* that it’s made me skeptical.

I'm glad, relieved, and ecstatic to find I was totally wrong.

This is an amazing story. It weaves the story of an orphan, Wen Ming, and Meg Lindsey, a woman who never thought she wanted to be a mother. It's broken into segments from the POV of Wen, Meg, and at the end Zhen An (later Eva). It explores the depths of true familial dysfunction, and the ugliness and the beauty of international adoption.

There is an overarching theme of recognizing love and learning to forgive. It’s about holding your past in one hand and letting go of what needs to be gone, and opening your hand to the future of what you’re meant to be. It even has the mysterious, ethereal quality you find in the telling of Chinese folklore with omens of good luck, and a woman that appears and disappears without notice.

This is truly an “I laughed, I cried” novel, though I’d add- I raged, I cheered, and clutched my chest an awful lot. At one point, early in the story- I was yelling back at the MC’s mother. I was that pulled into the story.

This is a Christian novel with real Christianity in it. It takes some good hard looks at situations that, sadly, a lot of Christian novels would normally just gloss over with a "just pray, trust God, and it'll all be peachy by morning- and if it's not, I guess it's just God's will". I appreciate this honest look at life with a real Christian at its core, that doesn't have pat answers for the hard stuff. (Well done, Ms. Efken.)

Meredith Efken writes with such poetry. She writes with a clear knowledge of these two worlds, China and California. It makes me want to go back and re-write my novel with careful attention to well-matched, well-placed beautiful words.

A hearty two thumbs up, no hesitations whatsoever. Go read now!