Review: THE GIRL I AM, WAS, AND NEVER WILL BE

Title: The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be: A Speculative Memoir of Transracial Adoption by Shannon Gibney

Book Beginnings quote:

Prologue

I WAS BORN January 30, 1975, in Ann Arbor, Michigan

     The name on my birth certificate is Shannon Gibney, and my parents are listed as Jim and Susan Gibney. These are my white adoptive parents, who raised me. They gave me the loafers I remember wearing almost forty years ago. The backyard woods where my imagination first grew roots was theirs.

     The woman who gave birth to me and subsequently relinquished me was named Patricia Powers. She was a white, working-class Irish American woman who had a short relationship with my African American birth father, Boisey Collins, Jr. My birth mother named me Erin Powers after I was born, but I didn't find that out until I was nineteen. I possess no childhood memories of either of them.

Friday56 quote:

IN THIS SPACE, in the space between the stories ... in the space between what really happened, what could have happened, what almost did happen to another girl with another mother who relinquished her and another absent Black father ... in this space is where we exist, we have always existed. Where truth is born and exiled.

Summary: 

Part memoir, part speculative fiction, The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be explores the often surreal experience of growing up as a mixed-Black transracial adoptee.

It is a book woven from the author's true story of growing up as a mixed-Black transracial adoptee and fictional story of Erin Powers, the name Shannon was given at birth, a child raised by a white, closeted lesbian.

At its core, the novel is a tale of two girls on two different timelines occasionally bridged by a mysterious portal and their shared search for a complete picture of their origins. Gibney surrounds that story with reproductions of her own adoption documents, letters, family photographs, interviews, medical records, and brief essays on the surreal absurdities of the adoptee experience.

The end result is a remarkable portrait of an American experience rarely depicted in any form. (Publisher)

Review: As I was preparing myself to review The Girl I Am I ran into the word "surreal." That is exactly the right word to describe this book. Read the prologue and the book is obviously a memoir. Then comes the interlude starting with IN THIS SPACE (Friday56 quote) and the reader realizes that something other than a memoir is at hand. Let me correct that, some chapters titled "Shannon Gibney," are a memoir about what life was like growing up transracial in a white family, how Shannon found her birth mother, what that tenuous relationship was like, and how she discovered he father had died when she was six. Then there were wormholes, time travel, and alternate histories. Those chapters were titled "Erin Powers." Here the author is imagining a different life for herself but is somehow aware of her other life. Confusing. Surreal.

Interspersed throughout the two concurrent stories are actual documents and letters about Shannon's adoption and from her birth mother. There are family trees and stories about the alternate world other adoptees have had to deal with. I am not sure why this book was published as a YA title. Not only is it a YA  title it won a Printz Honor award this year. Perhaps the publisher thought it should be YA because the author is nineteen for a good portion of the action. Perhaps the publisher or the author thought that other teens need a book that covers the topic of transracial adoption and how confusing life can be, often is, for such kids. Whatever the reason, I had a hard time imagining any teen reading this book, or not setting this book aside because it is so confusing. Sigh. That said I made it to the end and was glad to see that Shannon Gibney was grateful to her adopted family and expressed love to her parents and brothers.

My Rating: 3 stars

 

-Anne