This novel is based on a true story. In 2009 eleven female remains and an unborn fetus were discovered on the West Mesa outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Irene Blea has synthesized what she experienced while living in the region and introduces us to Dora, a single mother, and her two daughters, Luna and Andrea. Luna has been missing for several months. The police, Dora, Andrea and members of the community have searched for Luna with no success. Dora struggles to endure not knowing about her missing daughter, Andrea's emotional distance, and adjusting to the recent purchase of a new house next to a one hundred acre field when a human bone is found in the field. She watches the investigation of the bone and the discovery of many more bones on television. Dora's physical, emotional and spiritual well-being decline while she awaits notice that Luna is, or is not, buried in the field. Irene Blea has personal experience with the dark side of the city and women like Dora, whose daughters frequent nightclubs and bars among drug addicts and prostitutes. She also draws from Mexican American culture. Blea developed and taught Mexican American Studies for twenty-seven years and has written several articles, poetry, and textbooks for university classroom use. The author retired from California State University-Los Angles as a tenured, Full Professor and Chairperson of Mexican American Studies in 1998.

This work provides a compelling explanation of something that has bedeviled a number of feminist scholars: Why did popular authors like Edna Ferber continue to write conventional fiction while living lives that were far from conventional? Amanda J. Zink argues that white writers like Ferber and Willa Cather avoided the subject of their own domestic labor by writing about the performance of domestic labor by "others," showing that American print culture, both in novels and through advertisements, moved away from portraying women as angels in the house and instead sought to persuade other women to be angels in their houses. Zink further explores lesser-known works such as Mexican American cookbooks and essays in Indian boarding school magazines to show how women writers "dialoging domesticity" exemplify the cross-cultural encounters between "colonial domesticity" and "sovereign domesticity." By situating these interpretations of literature within their historical contexts, Zink shows how these writers championed and challenged the ideology of domesticity.

"[These volumes] are endlessly absorbing as an excursion into cultural history and national memory."--Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

In 1997 journalist Karin Evans walked into an orphanage in southern China and met her new daughter, a beautiful one-year-old baby girl. In this fateful moment Evans became part of a profound, increasingly common human drama that links abandoned Chinese girls with foreigners who have traveled many miles to complete their families. At once a compelling personal narrative and an evocative portrait of contemporary China, The Lost Daughters of China has also served as an invaluable guide for thousands of readers as they navigated the process of adopting from China. However, much has changed in terms of the Chinese government?s policies on adoption since this book was originally published and in this revised and updated edition Evans addresses these developments. Also new to this edition is a riveting chapter in which she describes her return to China in 2000 to adopt her second daughter who was nearly three at the time. Many of the first girls to be adopted from China are now in the teens (China only opened its doors to adoption in the 1990s), and this edition includes accounts of their experiences growing up in the US and, in some cases, of returning to China in search of their roots. Illuminating the real-life stories behind the statistics, The Lost Daughters of China is an unforgettable account of the red thread that winds form China?s orphanages to loving families around the globe.