Jacob R. Wheeler,Kevin Kreutner
â€œAn adoption professional once told me, â€˜At its best, there is no adoption system as good as Guatemalaâ€™s. At its worst, there is none worse.â€™â€â€”from the foreword by Kevin Kreutner,Â In ,Between Light and Shadow, veteran journalist Jacob Wheeler puts a human face on the Guatemalan adoption industry, which has exploited, embraced, and sincerely sought to improve the lives of the Central American nationâ€™s poorest children. Fourteen-year-old Ellie, abandoned at age seven and adopted by a middle-class family from Michigan, is at the center of this story. Wheeler re-creates the painful circumstances of Ellieâ€™s abandonment, her adoption and Americanization, her search for her birth mother, and her joyous and haunting return to Guatemala, where she finds her teenage brothersâ€”unleashing a bond that transcends language and national borders. ,Â Following Ellieâ€™s journey, Wheeler peels back the layers of an adoption economy that some view as an unscrupulous baby-selling industry that manipulates impoverished indigenous Guatemalan women, and others herald as the only chance for poor children to have a better life. Through Ellie, Wheeler allows us to see what all this means in personal and practical termsâ€”and to understand how well-intentioned and sometimes humanitarian first-world wealth can collide with the extreme poverty, despair, misogyny, racism, and violent history of Guatemala.,Â 
Parenting,Adoption,Nonfiction
Between Light and Shadow: A Guatemalan Girl's Journey through Adoption