The Golem and the Jinni

I just finished THE Most Amazing book!  It was written by a brand new author, Helene Wecker and is called The Golem and the Jinni.  I spotted it on the new shelf at the library and was intrigued by the title because those are two very uncommon mythological beings to write about.  I'm always a little leery of a new author because I don't know them.  I don't like to stop books in the middle so I plan on investing some time and effort in their work and I kind of want it to be worth it.  This time it so was!

The book is set in New York in the 1890s and deals with...everything.  It's about immigration, community, life, love, etc.  Now, normally that would be Way too much going on in one book, but this is so seamless.  And the background-oh!  It was described so beautifully and realistically, I could lose myself in the setting.

I want to read it again to really get all the subtlety and social and cultural minutiae cause I was so absorbed in the story that I know I didn't catch it all.  I can't decide who I should recommend the book to.  It's fantasy in some aspects, but not in a geeky way.  It's a love story, sort of, but not in a sappy way.  It's historical fiction, but golems and jinnis are kind of not real or historical.  It's different than most anything I've ever read.  So try it; if you like any of those you should read it.  So get on that.

Adoption Update-Feb. 5th

Hello my lovelies!  Did you think I had dropped off the face of the planet?  The really horrible thing is that stuff happened all last month, but by the time I got home for going and doing and dealing with whatever was going on I was too tired to write.

Since I last blogged, movement has been made on the adoption front.  After we got our preliminary acceptance, we arranged an intake interview for the 13^th.  It’s called an “interview”, but really it was just talking to our adoption counselors.  We have two, sort of.  Our main guy is located in Knoxville so we also have a contact locally who will do our individual and couple interviews soon (hopefully!).  At the intake interview were given “The Paperwork”, the most massive stack of detailed and invasive questions ever.  Infertility treatments are invasive by nature, but adoption is equally invasive, but in a different way.  Either way you go, you no longer have a shred of privacy when all is said and done.

Besides being long the paperwork is confusing.  They can ask “What is your name?” but they ask it in such a way that I am no longer sure what my name is!  The worst part is that it is emotionally exhausting.  This has pretty much been me for the past three weeks:

I feel super excited that we are working and making progress.  I feel anxious about whether we will be chosen by anyone.  I feel angry that we are having to go through so many personal inquiries from every angle when “natural” parents don’t have to prove they are fit in any way before birthing a child.  I feel frustrated by the reading. Then I cycle back to excited.

Oh the reading!  Guys.  There are no words.  Really.  I just finished reading a fiction book with an adoption subplot (a happy coincidence as I didn't know that was in the story when I started the book).  In the book there were three adopted kids, the middle one ended up being a psychopath who killed the other two and it was STILL more positive than the assigned adoption books I've been reading.  I’m not even kidding.

However, we have ALMOST plowed through.  If we work really really hard we could be done with all the paperwork we have by the end of this week!