Mother Mother by Jessica O' Dwyer

Publisher:Apprentice House Press
Expected Publication date:  October 1st 2020
Pages: 306

Julie Cowan is a curator in a contemporary art museum and lives with her husband Mark.
They are in the middle of a process to adopt their son Juan from Guatemala. A process that is not going easy and takes a lot of time and patience. After years, the moment is finally there to bring their six year old son home. Then begins a challenging journey, because their son's behavior, due to having spend the first years of his live in an orphanage, is not always easy. He still has to adjust and is not sure at some moments Julie and Mark are his real parents now and will not give him away anymore. Meanwhile, her work as a curator in a contemporary art museum asks a lot of her, because there is a new top notch museum director to who she really has to prove her work. But then they find out he has health issues, and they have to find his birth family in Guatemala for some genetic information and treatment. She hires a professional searcher to track her down, but when they finally located her, they find out a secret that truly put everything they where told about her in question.

The other narrator of the story is the birth mother of Juan, the indigenous Ixil Maya. In her chapters that alternate between Julie's POV, her life and  the events that led to Juan's landing in the orphanage during a time of political unrest in Guatemala are to be found out here and it is very entertaining to see the pov's of both main characters, that eventually come together in the last part, that has a plot twist that you don't expect as a reader but it truly works for this story, just as I didn't expect the story turn between Julie and Mark, but this made the story even more realistic.

The storyline overall is just wonderful, and I repeat, very realistic and different in a very good way. It is not often that books and novels take you to Guatemala, and Jessica O' Dwyer is a true expert in Guatemala, which she already shown in her previous book, Mamalita, an adoption memoir which is her personal experience story about the adoption process of her daughter in Guatemala and all the bureaucratic struggles she experienced.
That same struggle that takes years and years is the same that Julie and Mark face in this story, luckily though they can share their struggles in adoptive parents that are in the same boat. It was so hearwarming though when Julie and Mark's struggle and patience finally came to and end and they could bring Juan home with them, not knowing that they have to face many other struggles coming their way,  It was both gripping and tragic to read the story of Maya, and why she made the choice to give Juan up to the orphanage and eventually adoption. It really shows in a raw way how hard life in impoverished Guatemala is. This is something you don't read often and it truly added to the storyline that you could see both point of views that eventually got intertwined.

So overall, this new upcoming book by Jessica O' Dwyer is just as brilliant and amazing as her previous book, and I highly recommend it!!!