“In China… there is a belief that people who are destined to be together are connected by an invisible red thread. Who is at the end of your red thread?”

In Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, Ann Hood writes about losing her five-year-old daughter to an illness most children recover from without much pain or trauma — strep throat. The memoir is a beautiful and heart wrenching ode to loss and the comfort she discovered in knitting. Three years after Grace died, Ann and her husband went to China to adopt a baby girl, Annabelle. The Red Thread is a novel which illuminates the process of losing a precious daughter and finding love and hope in adopting a new soul to raise.

The Red Thread is a novel which tells many stories. First is Maya’s story: she runs an adoption agency helping anxious couples, who for a variety of reasons, want to adopt one of the many little Chinese girls needing new homes. But, unbeknownst to her clients, Maya started the agency after losing her own daughter in a tragic accident. Then we learn the stories of several of the couples who are trying to adopt a baby — some we sympathize with and others we wonder where their heads are at and if a baby is the best thing for them.

The most poignant stories, though, are the stories of the babies. We meet several Chinese women (and one father), who believe they must give up their babies, again for a variety of reasons.
A gentle and lovely book. ~Patti