Somebody's Baby

by Elaine Kagan

Book Overview

In 1959, a gentile boy was off-limits to a young Jewish girl living in a well-to-do Kansas neighborhood. Especially a boy with tattoos, a drifter from California who had spent time in jail, who worked in a gas station, and who would fight a man for looking at him the wrong way. Jenny Jaffe knew the rules, but when she saw Will McDonald for the first time, everything she knew about right and wrong disappeared. What was left was a passionate, once-in-a-lifetime...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0688157459
• ISBN13: 9780688157456
• Release Date: April 1998
• Publisher: William Morrow & Company
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.0" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

I cannot believe I have never heard of Kagan!

This is my first book by Elaine Kagan and I have my librarian to thank for that. She wrote her name down on my slip and said, try her. And I picked this one up in a hurry ~~ and it was one of the nicest books I've read in a long time.As an expectant mother, I cannot imagine ever giving up my babies. I cannot imagine losing the love of my life ~~ nor have my parents take me away from him and make me give up our children. But as I was reading this book, the images still came to mind and Kagan's words are vivid enough to imagine the terror, the sorrows and the pain that Jenny must have gone through to give up her baby. Hers and Will ~~ the only man she has ever loved. Then Claudia, the baby, begins a search to find an identity of herself ~~ she knew she was adopted ~~ her adoptive parents have never withheld the truth from her ~~ and she wanted to know where she got her looks from, her mannerisms ~~ to find the missing pieces of herself. And the search led to finding both of her biological parents. The search also opened up a new world for Claudia ~~ she was one of the lucky ones. All of her parents wanted her. She was the blessed one. I really enjoyed this book ~~ I had to put it down a couple of times to avoid crying over parts of it. And Kagan is a good writer ~~ she writes with passion and vividness. She takes you into her story and you can't easily escape from it without thinking of the issues she's trying to make you think about. In this case, adoption is a little-known subject for me ~~ and it opened my eyes to all the sides of the issues. However, I wish she did explore a little more about Claudia's adoptive dad's feelings about Claudia meeting her biological father. Dads are just as important to a child's life as the mothers are. This is a good read ~~ I highly recommend it. The story will enrapture you and you would want to know if Claudia's biological parents ever did find each other again. 4-14-02

The love of a lifetime

Elaine Kagan's "Somebody's Baby" will go down in history as one of the best novels I've ever read. The story of a woman who was adopted and is trying to find her birth parents and finding out more than she ever expected. This is also the story of man and woman who have loved each other an entire lifetime but are separated by circumstances beyond their control and are reunited many years later by the child they had together. This is the love story of a lifetime and one that you will remember forever. I loved this story and you will too.

Amazing story that hit a nerve

This book was definetly a page turner. I finished it in one day. I couldnt put it down. I was reading it in the prosepctive of the daughter and I found it to be quite interesting when I gave it to my mother and to hear her presepective and it was so different. I would love to know how to write or e mail the author.

a story of reunion & love; a personal view of adoption

This is a book I couldn't put down. It is the story of Jenny Jaffe, a Jewish girl living in Kansas City, and how she meets and falls in love with a non-Jewish boy named William Cole MacDonald. Jenny and Will have many sexual encounters and he teaches her to open up and be assertive. Her relationship with will is openly frowned upon by her parents, and when she ends up pregnant with Will's baby, her parents send her away to a home for wayward girls in Los Angeles. She has the baby and is forced to put it up for adoption. The story continues by telling the story of Claudia, Jenny's baby, and how she searches for her birthparents. It recounts the years of her life and her struggle to find the answers to the many questions that adopted children have. This is a story of an everlasting love, of reunion, and of adoption...a firsthand look at how an adopted child struggles to find answers, and how adoptive parents struggle to hold on to "their baby". This story tells the truth: True love never dies.