What Was Mine

November 2, 2015
Ross crafts a surprisingly sensitive meditation on the definitions of family and motherhood around a ripped-from-the-tabloids story. Reeling from a collapsed marriage and yearning to be a mother, Lucy Wakefield is perhaps not totally in her right mind when she snatches an unattended four-month-old infant from an Ikea shopping cart. Renaming the baby Mia, Lucy raises her to adulthood without arousing suspicion from the child’s family, friends, or nanny. Twenty-one years later, though, a convoluted twist involving a bestselling novel and a few Facebook searches brings the secret to light, and Mia is confronted with the shocking truth. As Lucy flees to China to avoid prosecution, Mia travels from New York to California to meet her birth family, but for Mia, coming to terms with this information is not quite so simple as assuming her old identity, and however angry she feels at Lucy, she finds it hard to reconcile the warm, loving mother she’s known with the actions of a kidnapper. Although the process by which Mia’s abduction comes out seems unrealistic and the shifting first-person narration doesn’t fully cohere, Ross deftly creates genuinely sympathetic characters and emotionally resonant prose around what could have felt sensationalistic.