Anne Tyler’s 17th novel begins in the Baltimore airport when two couples, one typically American and the other Iranian-American, meet their adoptive Korean infant daughters.
The story compares the different experiences of these two children, one placed with an American couple determined to preserve her Korean heritage, the other with an emigrant family striving to become as American as possible.
Tyler also makes us aware of the mixed feelings of an Iranian grandmother toward her adopted country: the conflict between wishing to conform and longing for the old Iranian days, with resentment toward the demands of the new society as well as toward the well intentioned but sometimes irritating overtures of an American grandfather eager to court her and her customs.
We learn a lot about Iranian immigrants, what it is like to be an adopted child from another country, and how American eagerness to cross cultural boundaries can sometimes rub other folks the wrong way.
As always, Tyler brings all her seemingly tangled, knotty strings into an artfully constructed macrame plantholder.