The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be

Starred review from January 30, 2023
Gibney strikes an intriguing balance between memoir and fantasy in this kaleidoscopic portrait that chronicles both her real-life childhood as Shannon Gibney and an alternate imagined life as Erin Powers, her birth name. After she’s born in January 1975, the biracial protagonist is, in reality, immediately relinquished by her white birth mother and adopted seven months later by white parents Jim and Susan Gibney. But elsewhere—in another dimension that the first-person narrator initially glimpsed through a wormhole in her mirror when she was 10—Erin lives, instead, with her birth mom and maintains close, if at times contentious, relationships with her extended family. What follows is an exploration of the subject’s identity as a transracial adoptee as examined through the protagonists’ differing—and sometimes eerily similar—lives across a nonlinear timeline. Collected letters and photographs from Gibney’s real life feature alongside recursive imaginings of who she might be if Gibney had grown up with her biological family. Asking the question, “Who was that girl, and who is she now?” this richly textured telling fills in the blanks “with scraps of speculation” where personal histories remain unknown. The result is a fantastical, transcendent memory collage that shirks convention in search of what is real and true about familial bonds. Ages 14–up.

May 26, 2023

Gr 11 Up-Given the enormous amount of literature dedicated to the good fortune or tragic-torn stories of orphans, Gibney hits hard with her part-memoir, part-speculative fiction, pastiche-approach to set the record straight and unravel the everyday pain of growing up biracial, adopted, with people who are not her birth parents. There is rage, there is research, there is speculation of what could be. Gibney tells her own story, with old photographs, letters from Children's Services, unfamiliar artifacts for outsiders (such as a letter of "non-identifying information" about her birth parents), holiday cards from mom, and a detailed family tree. Fans of Girl, Interrupted will be primed for this journey. Some segments are written in strike-through; others analyze pop culture depictions of other adoptees, such as Loki in The Avengers. But throughout the exploratory, experimental text, there is the narrative thread of a young person figuring out the real story, finding a center of truth in a pile of documents, a heroic journey to find home, a place to belong, an endeavor to re-inhabit the lost love of a tragically creative, mentally ill birth father and well-meaning, flawed birth mother. VERDICT An authentic journey for adoptees who are not allowed to feel sad but thrust into a stance of gratitude for a life they were given and for all readers who, after a loss, are reconstructing their identities.-Sara Lissa Paulson

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Starred review from February 15, 2023
Grades 9-12 *Starred Review* Transracial adoptee author Gibney guides readers through the time line of her youth as she makes sense of her adoption, birth parents, and identity. Using the present tense, Gibney describes her youth as a mixed-Black girl being brought up by a white family in Ann Arbor, Michigan, during the 1980s. Despite the unending love her adoptive mother provides, Gibney can't help but acknowledge the dissimilarities between herself and her family. Fast-forward to her college years: Gibney builds a fervent desire to connect with her blood relatives. What she discovers are mixed reviews of her Black birth father (who has passed away) and jumbled emotions toward her birth mother, who is white and recovering from alcoholism. Gibney eschews the "tools of mainstream literary fiction," blending her lived experiences as the adopted Shannon with fictionalized scenes where she appears as Erin Powers, the name given to her at birth. The inclusion of personal photos and letters allows Gibney to further reimagine her story in order to appreciate her past, present, and future while educating readers on the adoption process--and the fallacies and epistemological violence perpetrated by the "literature of adoption." Readers will praise the raw honesty and insight in this lovingly crafted memoir. Recommend to admirers of Echo Brown's Black Girl Unlimited (2020).

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Starred review from December 1, 2022
An ambitiously authentic adoption story where fiction does the work of truth, and archives, correspondence, and health records provide the roots of fantasy. When she was 19, Shannon Elaine Gibney met Erin Rebecca Powers via a letter from Child and Family Services of Michigan. Yet their existences had already been deeply and intimately interwoven. Shannon was adopted by middle-class White parents Jim and Susan Gibney soon after her birth in 1975, but her alcoholic White birth mother, Patricia Powers, had named her Erin. Narratively, time and space become impressively distorted as Gibney relays autobiographical accounts of Shannon and Erin that complicate her conceptions of self as a transracial adoptee, biracial Black woman, writer, and science-fiction fan. Erin is imagined at dinner tables with extended family whom Shannon would never know well, if it all, facing the racist familial microaggressions she can't quite avoid in any timeline. Biographical elements are similarly reconfigured: A maternal genetic predisposition to cancer and discovering parts of her Black biological father and his family tree that had all but been erased help flesh out Shannon and Erin in fuller, more embodied ways. Gibney invokes poet Audre Lorde as a sort of third mother, a source of creative inspiration and guidance. As both Erin and Shannon proceed through the spiral wormhole that threads this text together, Gibney offers up the singularly essential connective tissue of a robust and personal body of work. An innovative and captivating reflection on identity and self. (author's note, further reading) (Speculative nonfiction. 14-adult)

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