Daughters of the Bamboo Grove

Demick, whose earlier reporting on North Korea established her as one of the sharpest American chroniclers of East Asia, turns here to twins separated by China's one-child policy, one raised in rural China and one adopted into an American family with no knowledge of her sister's existence. The book's real subject isn't the abduction itself but what comes after: the halting, cross-language process of two young women and their families trying to build a relationship across a fracture neither chose and neither fully understands. Demick lets both households, and both countries' incentives under the one-child policy, sit in view without flattening either into villain or victim. It's a synthesis of two familiar narrative types, the adoption memoir and the one-child-policy expose, that gains force from being told together rather than separately.