Digging to America

Anne Tyler illuminates what it means to be an American. Two families, the Yazdans, originally of Iran, and the Donaldsons, of Baltimore, have each adopted a girl child from Korea. When the babies arrive on the same plane, the families' lives become intertwined. Blair Brown does a stellar job with the accents of the Yazdan clan, changing the intonations with each generation and with the time each character has been in the country. She is sensitive to the cultural subtleties of language and custom, modulating her voice to allow for brashness or modesty. Tyler's simple plot is enriched by details of family life and food, and even more so by Brown's clever narration. B.H.B. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine

September 4, 2006
Blair Brown is one of those rare performers who can capture an author's voice to perfection. She's had plenty of practice performing audiobooks, including Linda Fairstein's Death Dance
. Her vibrant reading of Digging
manifests her outstanding talent as she moves lightly and briskly through the narrative, pausing ever so slightly before Tyler's clever punch lines for added effect. Brown makes this wry satire about the adoption of foreign babies so laugh-out-loud funny that standup comics could study her timing. Both adults and children are played to perfection. Brown's enactment of Iranian immigrant Maryam Yazdan and Ziba, her daughter-in-law, is amazing in her accurate reproduction of the soft and liquid Farsi vowels. In contrast, American-born Sami, Maryam's son, speaks like the prototypical Easterner. Brown remembers that the children of immigrants sound like their peers, not their parents. This hilarious audiobook actually improves a fine novel. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover (Reviews, Feb. 27).

February 27, 2006
Tyler (Breathing Lessons
) encompasses the collision of cultures without losing her sharp focus on the daily dramas of modern family life in her 17th novel. When Bitsy and Brad Donaldson and Sami and Ziba Yazdan both adopt Korean infant girls, their chance encounter at the Baltimore airport the day their daughters arrive marks the start of a long, intense if sometimes awkward friendship. Sami's mother, Maryam Yazdan, who carefully preserves her exotic "outsiderness" despite having emigrated from Iran almost 40 years earlier, is frequently perplexed by her son and daughter-in-law's ongoing relationship with the loud, opinionated, unapologetically American Donaldsons. When Bitsy's recently widowed father, Dave, endearingly falls in love with Maryam, she must come to terms with what it means to be part of a culture and a country. Stretching from the babies' arrival in 1997 until 2004, the novel is punctuated by each year's Arrival Party, a tradition manufactured and comically upheld by Bitsy; the annual festivities gradually reveal the families' evolving connections. Though the novel's perspective shifts among characters, Maryam is at the narrative and emotional heart of the touching, humorous story, as she reluctantly realizes that there may be a place in her heart for new friends, new loves and her new country after all.

February 1, 2007
At a point when foreign adoptions are being contested and immigration continues to be problematic, Tyler seems to once again have her finger on the pulse of America. Two families meet at the airport as they await the arrival of their Korean-born daughters. The Iranian American Yazdans immediately set about Americanizing their daughter, while the Donaldsons do everything to help their child keep her Korean heritage. Leaning on each other for support as their daughters grow, these families have all the quirks one expects from Tyler's novelsincluding love to be found in the place one least expects it. When love becomes conflict, when a second adopted daughter fails to live up to the perfection of the first, we see mothers clinging even more tightly to roots that can only be severed and causing what in the hands of a lesser novelist would be an irrevocable rift. This might not be Tyler at her best (e.g.The Accidental Tourist or the more recentBreathing Lessons ), but listening to even a subdued Tyler is just plain fun, and Blair Brown is the perfect reader. For all collections.Rochelle Ratner, formerly with Soho Weekly News, New York

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