Lost children: the story of adopted children searching for their mothers.

• Author: Fields, Suzanne

Lost Children: The Story of Adopted Children Searching for Their Mother. Polly Toynbee. Hutchinson. Caroline Barnes, a beautiful woman in her mid-twenties, had two distinct fantasy images of her mother when she was growing up. In one her mother was ultra-glamorous, a Joan Collins, "beautiful and glittery." In the other vision, she was a poor little Irish waif, burdened with children, too poor to take care of Caroline.

Tom O'Mara had few fantasies about his mother, just a grinding obsession to know the woman who made him ashamed of his origins. His curiosity and anger accelerated when he heard that she had had another son whom she had also named Thomas.

Georgina Ellis knew everything she needed to know about her mother In fact, she read it in a faded newspaper clipping she found in a drawer when she was eight. Her mother, Ruth Ellis, had murdered her lover when Georgina was three, and achieved a macabre distinction. She was the last woman hanged in England.

Polly Toynbee, an English journalist and a former editor of this magazine, explores the psychological and sociological concerns of Caroline, Tom, Georgina, and others, and looks for their common threads. It is an elegant, provocative, and poignant study of children who have grown up without their original parents (which some euphemistically call "birth parents") and are usually obsessed with questions (often without answers) about themselves and their families.

The basic question Toynbee asks is one that her subjects feel passionately about: whether it's a good idea for adoptive parents to preserve the secrecy about the original parents. Should official adoption records that guarantee confidentiality to "birth parents" be open later to the child? In 17 states there is a "mutually voluntary registry," where medical information and other biographical facts can be retrieved. Seven states will search for a parent or child at the seeker's expense, if it's understood...