Finding Miracles

Milly is in ninth grade and has spent her school life letting everybody assume she was born to the family she lives with. The family is a good one and loves her, which is part of the problem: there is no grievance to point at, only a fact about herself she has decided not to hand over. She was adopted, out of a country she avoids naming even to herself, and the omission has hardened into a policy. Then a boy arrives at school who is from that country.

What moves her is not pressure but proximity. Pablo carries the place around as ordinary fact, language and food and family, and the ordinariness is the part she has never had access to. Her middle name is Milagros, miracles, which is the title doing double work. Alvarez spends a long first stretch on nothing but school friendships and a household before widening any of it, so the change in Milly is slow and mostly internal. The friendship turns into a romance, and the book eventually relocates itself to the country, where the question of who her birth parents were stops being something Milly refuses and becomes something she does.

Alvarez keeps the country unnamed and the politics general. That is deliberate, since it makes the book portable to any adopted reader, and it costs specificity; nobody comes out of this knowing a history. The pull is the smaller thing: what a person owes a fact about herself that nobody else can see, and what it costs to keep it quiet. It lands for readers near the adoption question, at whichever end of it.