Jeff Gammage China Ghosts

China Ghosts

Jeff Gammage

Morrow, Jun 2007, $25.95

ISBN: 006124029X

This is an interesting memoir of a couple adopting a child. Married for almost two decades Jeff and Christine Gammage decide to expand the family by adopting a Chinese infant. Finally after two years of horrific red tape (no pun intended), they succeeded in Changsha, Hunan Province when two years old silent Jin Yu joins the couple turning them into a family of three. However, as the Gammages will soon learn traversing the governmental bureaucrats and the insane laws to protect the child was the easy journey; parenting is the difficult but more rewarding quest made further complex by a quiet child who speaks a little Chinese while her new parents speak English.

Readers will appreciate this poignant memoir of the heart as author Jeff Gammage makes it clear how much he loves his daughter. The insight into the Chinese culture is vivid, but also as lucid is the deep look into the American culture re foreign adoptions. Easy to read, this is a winning bio of a writer's "passage to fatherhood" and his "daughter's journey to America".

Harriet Klausner