The Earthquake Child: A Novel
Jun 2023 · Simon and Schuster
Ebook
304
Pages
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About this ebook
The Earthquake Child is the story of an adoption, told through the voices of an adoptee, his desperate young birth mother, and his loving but grieving adoptive mother.
How can Joshua’s behavior be explained? This question is all-consuming for his adoptive family. Joshua was relinquished at birth, then adopted only days later. Is it his genetic inheritance of substance abuse and generational poverty that causes him to act out, run away and eventually become involved with drugs? Is it the losses he’s experienced in his adoptive family? Or is it the very fact of adoption itself—the trauma of being amputated from his gestational mother to be raised by a family unrelated to him by blood, culture, or biology?
What makes our children who they are? These voices and questions will resonate with all parents, but particularly with those who are or have been part of the adoption triangle: adoptees, mothers who have relinquished a child, and parents who’ve added a child to their family through adoption.
How can Joshua’s behavior be explained? This question is all-consuming for his adoptive family. Joshua was relinquished at birth, then adopted only days later. Is it his genetic inheritance of substance abuse and generational poverty that causes him to act out, run away and eventually become involved with drugs? Is it the losses he’s experienced in his adoptive family? Or is it the very fact of adoption itself—the trauma of being amputated from his gestational mother to be raised by a family unrelated to him by blood, culture, or biology?
What makes our children who they are? These voices and questions will resonate with all parents, but particularly with those who are or have been part of the adoption triangle: adoptees, mothers who have relinquished a child, and parents who’ve added a child to their family through adoption.
About the author
Elayne Klasson grew up on Chicago’s northside. She attended university and graduate school in the Midwest—Ohio State University and the University of Michigan, earning a Masters of Public Health and then a PhD in psychology. She lived and worked in Barbados, West Indies, for many years. Her professional career has been in academia at San Jose State University, with her research and clinical area of expertise being the severely mentally ill. A transplant to the Santa Ynez Valley in California, she is a popular lifestyle newspaper columnist there. She has also appeared on San Francisco public television as a restaurant critic. Elayne is the author of the National Jewish Book Award finalist and best-selling Love is a Rebellious Bird. She and her husband, David, have five children— between them; biological and adopted.
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