Famous Adopted People

August 27, 2018
In her tragicomic debut, sardonic and sincere in turn, Stephens follows an adoptee’s eventful search for her birth mother. Urged by her best friend (and fellow adoptee) Mindy, 27-year-old Lisa travels to South Korea to meet with an agency called MotherFinders. She’s initially told that her birth mother is completely untraceable. The half-white, half-Korean Lisa becomes easily entranced and seduced by the handsome Harrison, whom she initially believes is a handler for MotherFinders but is, in fact, working for a mysterious white woman named Honey. Harrison’s promised weekend of debauchery ends with Lisa awakening in Honey’s underground compound—north of the DMZ. Lisa soon learns that her reasons for landing there center around a very powerful family secret. Addicted to plastic surgery, surrounded by sycophants and North Korean supporters, and seemingly devoid of genuine compassion, Honey tries to remake Lisa in her own image. But Lisa—whose self-understanding has always been slippery at best—must learn how to reclaim agency in her own life. Peppered with moments of political satire and heartfelt introspection, Stephens’s novel also offers a fun-house depiction of the absurdities and horrors of the surveillance state. This is an excellent debut.

August 15, 2018
A biting critique of identity that lampoons genetic ties and ethnic stereotypes.Debut novelist Stephens begins her story in Seoul, South Korea, where best friends and fellow Korean-American adoptees Mindy and Lisa have gone to find their birthparents with the help of the MotherFinders agency. Lisa is ambivalent about her heritage and too reliant on Mindy to fill the void left by an absentee adoptive father. Lisa struggles with the fact that "the adopted child is a lie, her family a fiction," and one of the only ways she finds solace is by writing; Mindy suggested long ago that Lisa become a writer, but Lisa hasn't yet found a way to make it her profession. As the book begins, the two friends are having a falling out over Lisa's partying, and Mindy kicks Lisa out of their hotel room. Lisa continues hanging out with Harrison, the MotherFinders' uber-handsome fixer, who tricks her into traveling with him. The story takes a strange turn. Lisa is kidnapped and wakes up a prisoner in an extravagant compound, "the captive of a lunatic." She meets a cast of unusual international characters, several of whom look to be plastic surgery test cases; her captor forces her to change her appearance and records her every move. Stephens intersperses each chapter with quotes from famous adoptees, and Lisa's fixation on the physical characteristics of race and identity twist the idea of ancestry like a fun-house mirror. "Was I, all along, someone else?" Lisa wonders, as she finally meets her mother, the surgically altered and cartoonish Honey LeBaron. Lisa learns that the heavily-surveilled compound is in North Korea, but the bigger surprise is her mother's revelation about Lisa's family line. Lisa re-evaluates everything she thought she knew about herself as she tries to unravel "the enigma of Honey, the anti-mother who had reached across the years and the continents to drag me back to her stone-hearted bosom," and she plots her escape from her mother's lavish, bizarre prison. "I didn't love her," she says, ultimately confronting the darkness in herself, "but I recognized her, as familiar to me as my own self."The increasing tension and outlandishness of Stephens' work lends itself to a poignant take on the topic of family.

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Starred review from September 15, 2018
"Everyone, it seems, is telling our story but us," observes Lisa Pearl, the Korean-born, Bethesda, Maryland-raised transracial adoptee protagonist in Stephens' debut novel. The author, who describes herself as being "among the first generation of transnational, interracial adoptees," takes charge with a tale that will knock your expectations to, well, somewhere surreal yet real. Step into Villa Umma (Korean for "Mommy"), where Lisa has been kidnapped, no, delivered. She's had a shattering fight with her BFF, fellow adoptee Mindy, at a Seoul Dunkin' Donuts about meeting Mindy's birth mother and absconded to Jeju Island with the MotherFinders representative. Turns out Mindy's bioparent doesn't particularly want her, but Lisa's certainly does?not to reclaim 27 lost years but to further her Machiavellian plans to place Lisa's half brother at the helm of a nuclear-power-to-be. Trapped in her biomother's fickle, brutal, luxurious hideaway with a silent Chinese (minder) servant, Japanese (pedophile) chef, a South African (sycophant) assistant, and a Russian (butcher) doctor, Lisa must somehow survive long enough to escape. Introducing each chapter with a pixilated propaganda poster overlaid with a quote from "famous adopted people" (Greg Louganis, Debbie Harry, Vincent Chin, and more), Stephens' darkly comic, sharply irreverent, undeniably wise "Great Adoption Novel" is an unexpectedly timely, not-to-be-missed, epic wild ride.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)