Book Review Blog

This blog post is a review of the book I read for my book report.  The title of the book is Following the Tambourine Man: A Birthmother Memoir.  The book was written by Janet Mason Ellerby. She is currently a professor of English at the University of North Carolina.    As you can presume by the title, this book was written by a birthmother. She had given up her first born child when she was sixteen years old during the baby scoop era.  This book tells of her experiences of giving up a child and how she tried to heal over many years through her heartbreak.  The main point of this book was to tell the story of the author.  In the author telling her story she was able to tell the story of other women of her generation.  This book describes her struggle with her pregnancy, men, her parents, and the eventual raising of children of her “own”.  The story takes from her early teenage years up until her forties.  She describes how she felt through the pregnancy till the time she wrote this book in 2004.  The entire book consisted of three parts the loss, the journey, and the return.  By those titles alone you are expected to know the themes of the chapters to come.  Throughout the whole book she shares her thoughts and events from the time she was a young teenager up until she wrote this book.  She bounces back and forth from past to present to almost analysis her thoughts now and then.  To reflect on her life and how she got to where she is today.  Janet felt a lot of pain and loss throughout the entire 36 years she lived without her first born.  As a reader you feel her pain and connect with her story as she tells it.  Also with the joy and relief she felt when she was reunited.   

I would recommend this book to those who are interested in adoption because it tells of the heartaches that birthmothers may feel in giving up their children. It could be useful for those that would like to study the aspects of adoption, become an adoptive parent, or those debating whether or not they themselves should keep their own child.  Not only that I thought the book was very interesting and engaging.  It is one of those books that made you want to turn the next page.   

Lisa R.