Red Dust Road Paperback – 4 Mar. 2011

A memoir of the author’s search for and meeting with her birth parents, her love for her adopted parents, and the experience of growing up half-Nigerian in Scotland. I enjoyed this a lot, not least for the warmth and humanity of the author. I question her choice to structure the book non-chronologically, as this removed a lot of potential suspense and surprise, was occasionally confusing, and a dull chapter midway risked losing me as a reader because I thought I knew the whole story and the rest would be mere reminiscence. It wasn’t: there are surprises to come and the second half is structured much more suspensefully.

I chose this book for my book club as my sister recommended it.I really appreciated Jackie Kay’s insights on adoption and the racism that is “ I’ m notracist but where do you come from? “This is debatable because as a Geordie people used to say to me “Where do you come from?” The accent made some think of Ireland and even Wales.I took it as a “ I can’t quite place you question .” I can now see that to Jackie it seems racist but was it?I may say to a British Asian “ Where do you come from ?” Meaning “Where do you live?” Or “Which part of India did your family originally come from?”I am not being racist but interested as I believe that the only race is The Human Race and our skin pigmentation due to where we originated is a fascinating aspect of our race.I suppose it depends how the question is put like the tone of voice, the stresses put on different words the whole body attitude.I had hoped I would live long enough to see World Citizenship when where you came from was a matter of interest not a matter of ranking you in some racial order of intelligence or importance. It grieves me that colour is still a way of judging people.Adoption and the wish to find ones birth parents is fascinating.My father died in the Second World War so when doctors, ask about possible family inherited health problems, I have to say that I do not know. My father was also an orphan and the paperwork about his origins is not there.Some friends adopted children have found their birth parents with varying success. Disappointment, acceptance and relief. What a difficult situation for all to be in.Love as Jackie shows, the love and understanding her adoptive parents showed, helped her cope with finding out the truth of her birth parents,There were parts of the book which I found repetitive but then realised that her story was not a work of fiction but told it as it actually happened.I would recommend this to all to read.I was not a great fan of Nicola Sturgeon but her review showed her humanity and made me view her in a different light.Don’t judge people BT what you see on tv!!!

I knew nothing about Jackie Kay before opening this book, so it was a bit of a leap in the dark. She writes poetry, it turns out, and has obviously attracted some attention with it because she has an MBE. But this book is not about her writing, it's about how she was adopted and came to find her natural parents. Not that there's much to say about that - they never really become three dimensional, glimpsed in rather fraught occasional meetings in their old age. But if the central focus of the book is a little hazy, the decorative curlicues around the edges, the snippets of life with her adoptive parents, are what bring the story to vivid life, rich with humour and deep affection.To be honest, I often wonder with a book of this type just why the author decided to write it. Fiction and poetry I can understand - there's a desire to tell a story, to create something new and original, to say something. But a memoir? Why would an author think these little vignettes from an ordinary life, however well written, would be interesting? Is it catharsis? It's clear that meeting her birth parents was a traumatic experience, on both sides, so maybe Kay felt the need for some kind of release, a kind of blood-letting, or perhaps a way of packaging it all up neatly into something small and manageable like a book, so it can be tidily shelved away. But what exactly do all her friends and relations (long-standing or newly discovered) feel to be written about in this tell-all way - the family's secrets spread out in the open for people like me to maul and comment on and make judgments about.Maybe the author intended it partly as a celebration of her adoptive parents. Certainly the contrast with her birth parents could hardly be more stark, and makes their own eccentricities (they were active socialists and atheists) seem trivial and positively benign by comparison. It is also clear that, whatever the emotional ups and downs and physial difficulties involved in meeting her birth family, and however great her euphoria when things went well, it was always her adoptive parents who grounded her, and formed the solid bedrock of her life.This is not a particularly original book, in many ways. There are many other works written by people tracing their roots and finding out surprising things about themselves and their families. There are many other works about the experience of being black or lesbian or adopted. Some of them are far more profound or moving than this one. Kay had, after all, a fairly sheltered upbringing in a loving family. Nevertheless, however lightweight the subject matter, Kay's writing skills shine through, and there's enough humour and charm here to make the book an interesting, if not compelling, read.