About the author
Deborah Jennings is an environmental lawyer, retired from a global law firm. She was a partner for thirty-four years and chaired the firm’s national environmental practice for twenty years. Upon retirement, she wrote this memoir about the discovery of her adoption and ensuing international search for her origins. She grew up in very modest circumstances but discovered an illustrious biological family, including a grandfather who was a political figure and John Kennedy appointee and a grandmother who was from the Yucatan and graduated
from Cambridge University in the twenties. In addition to being an adoptee, the author is the mother of adopted twins. She is a former board member of Adoptions Together, now named Paths for Families, in Washington, DC.
synopsis
Ghost Child
A young woman from a blue-collar background—aspiring and driven—spent over twenty years quietly wondering if the family who raised her was truly hers. At thirty-two, she confirmed the unthinkable: she is the biological daughter of another, entirely unknown family.
Her search unfolds like a page-turning mystery, leading to an astonishing discovery—her biological grandfather was a U.S. diplomat and author, photographed in the Oval Office with President Kennedy, greeting Charles Lindbergh on the tarmac, and meeting with Rosa Parks and international leaders. Her grandmother was a Cambridge-educated Mexican, who described to her an exotic heritage of haciendas and aristocracy in the Yucatan. Her birth mother, Katie, a Bohemian expatriate in Cuernavaca, Mexico, gave birth to her in secret and lived childless ever since.
Raised by loving parents who didn’t finish high school, she now must reconcile her upbringing with an extraordinary legacy. Ghost Child is a sweeping story of identity, belonging, and the strange, poignant bond between a daughter and the unforgettable birth mother she did not know.
reviews & testimonials
What readers say
"There was a certain disdain in the way she characterized her relationship with her parents. Curiously, nothing the grandparents had said to me suggested the estrangement she now described. I found it hard to reconcile the descriptions of her mother, Beatriz, with the warm and gracious, proud grandmother of twenty-four grandchildren, whom I’d just met."
"Another era, another universe but the same house. I felt the presence of my grandmother and my great-grandmother and the love between them. I savored the images and the moment. Life is so interconnected."
Where to find the book
