Between Light and Shadow: A Guatemalan Girl's Journey Through Adoption - Hardcover

Jacob D. Wheeler

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0803233620 ISBN 13: 9780803233621

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 2011

Synopsis

“An adoption professional once told me, ‘At its best, there is no adoption system as good as Guatemala’s. At its worst, there is none worse.’”—from the foreword by Kevin Kreutner

In Between Light and Shadow veteran journalist Jacob Wheeler puts a human face on the Guatemalan adoption industry, which has exploited, embraced, and sincerely sought to improve the lives of the Central American nation’s poorest children. Fourteen-year-old Ellie, abandoned at age seven and adopted by a middle-class family from Michigan, is at the centre of this story. Wheeler re-creates the painful circumstances of Ellie’s abandonment, her adoption and Americanization, her search for her birth mother, and her joyous and haunting return to Guatemala, where she finds her teenage brothers—unleashing a bond that transcends language and national borders.

Following Ellie’s journey, Wheeler peels back the layers of an adoption economy that some view as an unscrupulous baby-selling industry that manipulates impoverished indigenous Guatemalan women, and others herald as the only chance for poor children to have a better life. Through Ellie, Wheeler allows us to see what all this means in personal and practical terms—and to understand how well-intentioned and sometimes humanitarian first-world wealth can collide with the extreme poverty, despair, misogyny, racism, and violent history of Guatemala.

About this title

Review:

"Jacob Wheeler brings some desperately needed clarity to the socially complex, morally and legally confusing issue of U.S. adoptions from Guatemala. He has done the legwork, shown commitment and courage, and the reporting in this book is diligent, heartfelt and thoughtful." --Francisco Goldman, author of New York Times Notable The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop and The Long Night of White Chickens

"Jacob Wheeler has written a rare masterpiece of heartbreak, discovery, and adventure, in that Between Light and Shadow is a rare work of compassion, clarity, truth-telling, and above all, humanity. This is the human drama writ large: Who am I? What am I? asked by children whose imploring voices Wheeler captures pitch-perfectly. I can't imagine a more searing and dramatically told account of youth and parenthood. This is a wonderful, emotionally satisfying book, told masterfully." --Doug Stanton, author of New York Times bestsellers In Harm's Way and Horse Soldiers

About the Author:

Jacob Wheeler is a freelance journalist, editor at TheUptake.org, and publisher of the Glen Arbor Sun (Michigan). His writings have appeared in In These Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications. Kevin Kreutner is the father of two children from Guatemala and the chief writer for the popular GuatAdopt.com website.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0803233620
• ISBN 13: 9780803233621
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 248