125 The Imprint of Another Life: Adoption Narratives and Human Possibility. Margaret Homans. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. pp. 300. Reviewed by John McLeod Elegantly written and exhaustively researched, Margaret Homans’s The Imprint of Another Life is prefaced by quotations from Jeannette Winterson and Kimberley Leighton that set the intellectual compass of this remarkable and pointedly unsentimental study of representations of adoption. The citation from Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? attends to the missing pasts of adoptive life as openings rather than voids, bearing spaces of incipient personhood rather than the forever eliding identities (the citation also provides the title for Homans’s book). The quotation from Leighton underlines adoption as a mode of possibility, a gifting of new knowledge rather than a grieving for an absent identity. More than anything else, for Homans adoption is an occasion for creativity, one that can broker new knowledges and relations while casting norms and assumptions of personhood into doubt. Determined to think about adoption both against and beyond those biocentric ideas that would declare adoptive relations as always synthetic and ever second best, Homans patiently circumnavigates a wealth of adoption-related texts from the nineteenth-century English novel to modern American memoir, fiction, and film, in order to challenge the often Manichean mindset that has pitted adoptive and consanguineous families as opposites: the former brokered by financial rather than good fortune and puzzled by bodily difference, the latter born from acceptable love and guaranteed by physical resemblance. Her aims are twofold: to take a supportive but always critical eye to representations of adoption, often challenging those texts that still seem complicit with biocentric norms and myths of blood, and to mobilize the new knowledges arising from adoptive relations to challenge those biocentric models of personhood that position one’s natal origins as the unimpeachable synchronic source of identity, impervious to the emotional and cultural weather of our lives as they develop diachronically. These insights are empowered but not preoccupied by Homans’s life as a parent of an adoptee, and the arguments she assembles are generously offered to readers beyond the adoption triad. “I have come to see,” she writes, “that adoption raises the most vital questions about human identity and the value and meaning of individual human lives” (1). In the introduction, Homans set out the parameters of her book as an attempt to explore how a range of texts have helped her think about the Adoption & Culture Vol. 5 (2017) 126 issues that arise from adoption in the twenty-first century.As such, the book is thematically arranged and eschews a more conventionally historical approach. Her choice of texts is eclectic, she claims, so no coverage is risked, although to this reader her knowledge of adoption representations and relevant scholarly criticism is extremely wide-ranging and informed. These early pages anticipate several of the standpoints that emerge later: the refusal to accept mystical or essentialist notions of “birth culture”; the recognition of the acute pain of adoptive life for many along with a cleareyed critique of those within the triad determined still to reach for and indulge biocentric thinking and the languages of origins and blood; the desire to find and value new ways of thinking and modes of representation that edge us closer to the experiential particulars of adoptive life that cannot be adequately realized through conventional narrative lines. As such, Homans might seem less sympathetic to those within the triad whose political advocacy concerning one’s right to documentation and the end of closed adoption files often turns on a biocentric ideal of personhood in terms of bloodlines and definitive origins. Yet Homans remains open to and supportive of these endeavors and both carefully and consciously situates her critique very much within the fault lines of adoption rendered severally (and by no means harmoniously, of course) as a political, cultural, and philosophical concern. The first of the book’s four chapters, “Money and Love,” tackles the uncomfortable matter of the centrality of finance to adoption contracts (as we know, adoption usually involves the legal transfer of a child from impoverished to wealthy parents). Homans points out that family-making is...