Origins....

Red Dust Road by Jackie Kay

This is an autobiographical novel about Miss Kay's beginnings.

Miss Kay was a mixed race child who was adopted by British communists in the early 1960s and raised with her mixed race adoptive brother in Scotland. The communist party, that her parents belonged to, appears to be much like a community church with much of its same meetings and testimonials and adult and youth camps. There doesn't seem to be much of a difference between religious and political in the human need to belong. But I don't believe in mixing them anyway.

Miss Kay, with the encouragement of her adoptive mother, begins the quest to discover her biological birth parents. She goes to the highlands of Scotland to find her mother, and to Nigeria to find her father. She also encounters the lives and the children that her mother and father made after her, and that they didn't or couldn't abandon as they did her.

Her mother had mental disruptions that have culminated in early onset Alzheimer's Disease. For a woman who was willing to buck her upbringing to make a baby with a Nigerian Exchange Student and who later married an South East Indian or Indonesian man and had three children with him, Miss Kay's birth mother is a very timid and fearful woman. The birth mother does allow Miss Kay into her life, but without the knowledge of her children or husband, and in a very limited way. Letters and five actual visits with her birth mother are all Miss Kay receives from that connection. The birth mother's highland family are more willing to accept Miss Kay, but they have no say with her mother.

Miss Kay's Nigerian father is a man of science and a religious Nut. Upon his first meeting with Miss Kay, he spends two solid hours singing and chanting bible verses, attempting to win Miss Kay to Christ. The communist party has already sowed that ground, Miss Kay is an unrepentant Atheist, which she doesn't reveal to her birth father because she hopes to have some sort of relationship with him.

The birth father considers Miss Kay to be his "Sin" and that is why she must come to Jesus, to wash the father of his "Sin". The converts of a religion are always the blood washing of the proselytizer's "Sins". Even Paul had the sneaking realization of that after his trip to Damascus.

Miss Kay does make the acquaintance of her Nigerian father's family and children without the father's consent or knowledge. The children, like her mother's highland aunts, are very welcoming to her. What is about these pesky birth parents that is so constipated in the familial way?

Miss Kay finds some new members of her extended family, but the core of that family, her birth mother and father, remain distant and uninvolved. No doubt, it was one of the reasons that they gave her up to the adoptive system.

There is No Dog by Meg Rosoff

One of the pleasures of reading young adult novels is the brisk pace with which the characters are established and the action commences. There is none of that meandering and digression that inhabits many "serious" fictions of adults.

This book considers the question of: "If God is Good, then why is there evil and suffering in the World?"

And the answer to that in this book is that God is a seventeen year old boy with all the emotional and hormonal fluctuations and motivations of a regular seventeen year old boy. Good Luck with reasoning with that.

And so we go on an adventure of the love life of a seventeen year old boy with a Big Case of Omnipotence (and some acne).