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Title: Dazzling
Review: This is simply one of the best books of recent memory. In place of the self-involved, self-centered ramblings of the typical memoir, Saffian gives us a complicated story about people wrestling with elemental problems: family, loyalty, loss. And even though she is at the center of that story, she does a marvelous job of making everyone else in the book as real as she is. The title is well-chosen, since the book is suffused with an almost Greek sense of the way life entails coming to terms with your destiny -- in Saffian's case, the sudden and unexpected appearance of her birth parents. This is a book of uncommon maturity and seriousness. I've read it twice now, even though I have no special interest in adoption, and I thought it even more impressive the second time around.
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