THE STORY I'LL TELL

Love for an adoptive child guides fanciful musings about his origins.

A mother snuggles her child and reads him a book while italicized text suggests her thoughts: “Someday when you ask where you came from, I’ll tell you a story.” Ensuing double-page spreads present clever, fantastic scenarios of a baby arriving in a hot air balloon’s basket, in a horseman’s satchel, and in the arms of an angel, among other visions. Some scenes use geographic or cultural markers to suggest specific heritage—a reference to “the mountains of Yunnan” suggests that the child was born in China. While text avoids gendered pronouns and nouns, artistic markers such as blue pajamas and short, cropped hair hint that the child is a boy, which is notable since the vast majority of Chinese children placed for adoption are girls. A heartwarming conclusion ties the mother’s fanciful stories to the parents’ real flight through the sky with their new baby and acknowledges that “the truth is a beautiful story too.” But, despite a line about how the baby "cried for things lost and new," nowhere in this beautiful truth is there room for overt acknowledgement of birthparents, which is a shame, given the loving depiction of the multigenerational adoptive family that concludes the book.

An incomplete, if lovingly told, adoption story.