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.

October 1, 2015
An infertile advertising executive leaves IKEA with another woman's baby and, despite "promises to the universe," keeps her. When a co-worker suggested "visualization" after Lucy Wakefield's unsuccessful fertility treatments, Lucy furnished a nursery. Her husband, suspecting she'd never move on, left her. When Lucy spots a baby slumped in an IKEA cart, she's overcome. "I can honestly say that my only intention in reaching into the cart was to right the baby. But as soon as I pressed my palms against her doughy arms, I felt a force so strong I can still feel the bind in my chest." She tells herself they'll just get some fresh air but goes home and names the child Mia. From the beginning readers know she doesn't get away with it forever. The novel is told in first-person chapters from the points of view of Lucy; Mia's biological mother, Marilyn; Mia when she's 21; and several more people]some have a cameo, others get many chapters. It's never clear who they're speaking to, which adds to the strangeness. Marilyn moves to northern California and gets into yoga and crystals; she's a little too perfectly positioned to help Mia heal from "bad energy" when she discovers the truth. Lucy sets up that discovery in a fairly unbelievable way, then escapes immediate repercussions through another unreal plot twist. All of this is consistent with the improbable premise that an otherwise successful, stable woman would help herself to a stranger's baby. But suspending disbelief when reading well-written fiction can be pleasant. Ross' prose is both readable and enjoyable, and she touches on interesting ideas about identity, family, and the malleability of the human psyche. Palatable lies that, once digested, potentially reveal some unpalatable truths, not unlike ads.

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Starred review from December 1, 2015

Lucy has a great job and a fancy apartment in New York City. Twenty-one years ago, she stole a baby from a shopping cart and has lovingly and lavishly raised the child ever since, claiming to everyone, including her daughter, that she was legally adopted. Mia is now finishing college and is very happy with Lucy as her only family. Then a coincidence, and the pervasive reach of social media allows Mia's birth mother to find her lost child, and life changes irrevocably for everyone involved. Ross's second novel (after the e-pubbed Making It) is a compelling and moving story that asks many questions about family, love, and justice. It is told from different perspectives, even if some minor characters just get a chapter or a page or two, which highlights how many people the kidnapping has affected. The ending hints at possible forgiveness and redemption. Whether Lucy deserves this or not will give book clubs much fodder for discussion. VERDICT Moving at a hard-to-put-down, breathless pace, this is suspenseful domestic fiction at its best.--Jan Marry, Williamsburg Regional Lib., VA

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2015
Lucy Wakefield never planned to steal her. The baby was alone, buckled into a cart at IKEA, listing sideways with a toothy grin. Lucy thought she'd just take her outside for some air since the IKEA was so aggressively air-conditioned. In a daze, Lucy brought the baby home and watched the news reports roll in. Lucy knew the baby was named Natalie, but she was too terrified of the legal consequences to return her to Marilyn, her panicked mother. She decided to call the baby Mia. With cleverly forged documents and a believable adoption story, Mia and Lucy became the family Lucy always imagined, until Mia finds out about her abduction. A story of three women learning to navigate new love and loss, What Was Mine is an emotionally-grounded read. Ross weaves the lives of Marilyn, Lucy, and Mia together, charting the decades-long aftershocks that come from one fateful decision. By giving readers the chance to examine what may be unforgivable, Ross brings an entirely new twist to the usual abduction story. Fans of Gillian Flynn and Maria Semple will enjoy the intensely introspective What Was Mine.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)