Why would a mother give up her daughter? Can abandonment ever be an act of love? And could you ever forgive her? Written in the first-person present tense, this is a powerful, intelligent and arresting look at parenting, foster care and the issues of finding your identity.
'My life begins at the Y...' Abandoned as a newborn at the doors of the local YMCA and then bounced between foster homes, Shannon eventually finds stability in the home of Miranda, a single mother with a daughter of her own. But as Shannon grows, so do her questions. Will she ever belong? Who is her true family? And why would her parents abandon Shannon on the day she was born? The answers lie in the heartrending tale of her mother, a headstrong young woman trapped in a tragic series of events that will destroy her family and test the limits of her compassion and sacrifice.
Marjorie Celona received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was an Iowa Arts fellow and recipient of the John C. Schupes fellowship. In recent years, she has been the Olive B. O'Connor fellow at Colgate University and writer-in-residence at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Harvard Review, Glimmer Train, and Crazyhorse, amongst others. Born and raised on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, she now lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.
