Pain, like joy, must be given and shared. That is why Mauro Bartolo—a physician and adoptive father to a child for five days—offers us his grief so that from it may grow love, and so that other Kim Sools (the boy's name) might find families of their own.
The book contains two stories: the father's, which is longer, and the child's, eagerly awaited by the reader, brief but intense. The prose flows easily and pleasantly; you read it straight through. It moves from the author's childhood—he loved airplanes—to the light and shadow of his medical practice, rendered with profound humanity and without sentimentality, and on to his marriage with the woman who would champion adoption. Mauro Bartolo captures the dismay, the fear, the hesitation of a father faced with the possibility of adopting a child. And after the swift and painful story of this son, he speaks to us all with power about what an adopted child truly is: "...because he is the child of my mind and my heart, he is the child of my choice, he is the child of my culture and my knowledge.... He is not the child of a moment...even if wonderful... he is the child of eternity, from where I come and where I go." He can say this after what he has lived through, and he shares it with us as a message of hope—not merely of sorrow.
A.C.