Review of "Erin's Journal" by Natalie Iseli-Chan

Score: 93+/100 (9.3+ out of 10)

There are few things more fascinating than someone's diary! (Not like we ever got nosy and dug through someone's before...)

What makes a diary so interesting? Well, because it's personal, informal, and unfiltered--all things which this book aspires to be (and often succeeds at being).

In this book, Erin is an eleven-year-old adopted girl in Western Canada who starts a journal at the beginning of sixth grade. At first she writes about normal school stuff and her “standard family of eight” (four humans and four cats), but very quickly the focus becomes how other people treat her because she is adopted. Friends and adults constantly ask intrusive questions like “Who is your real mom?” or “Why did they give you away?” and make comments that frame her as either tragic or “lucky” and rescued. These moments trigger a lot of frustration and hurt, especially when her best friend blurts out her adoption story on the bus without permission.

Through the fall, Erin uses the journal to sort through complicated feelings. She loves her parents deeply and feels safe at home, yet she has a “little hole” inside when she thinks about her birth mother and the blurry, missing parts of her story. She feels like she is walking a fence between belonging and not belonging, made of two stories that only she has read. She also gets very specific about language, making a whole list of better words to replace phrases like “real parents” or “given away,” because the usual vocabulary feels wrong and hurtful.

After a particularly nasty cafeteria incident, Erin decides to turn her English “big project” into something that could change how her classmates see adoption. She begins to channel all that confusion, anger, and curiosity into something more constructive, using the assignment as a way to speak up instead of just react. With the support of her amazing teacher, Ms. Lee, her parents, and the school librarian, Erin grows into a kind of quiet social warrior, a seeker and advocate for truth who wants everyone around her to have better words, better questions, and better stories about adoption.

This book does quite a few things well. First of all, the doodles and the pictures really give the impression of how raw, real, and lived-in this diary is. Honestly, this is a brilliant concept. There are times when the execution is a bit rough (in our opinion). Part of that is simply the fact that we already read the author's non-fiction work, The Little Book of Nosy Questions About Adoption, which essentially said the same things and confronted the same issues.

In isolation, both books are solid. Together, they come across as a bit redundant. One issue we noticed is that a lot of this book sounds like a fictional rehash of The Little Book of Nosy Questions About Adoption, which then has the additional problem of making Erin sound like a mouthpiece for the author. We'd argue that's probably the weak point of this book—when the author's and the character's voices become intermingled and seem indistinguishable from one another. It happens in books from time to time, especially when a character is grandstanding and trying to make a point. It happened in I Saw What I Saw by Tony Garrantino when Reggie starts giving a profound speech about social justice in the middle of a dining room (if we remember correctly) while the other characters just stare at him, probably imagining an epic instrumental score complete with an angelic choir.

The problem with having a character become an author's mouthpiece is that it distrupts the immersion. It also tends to make the narrative sound more rhetorical and didactic rather than entertaining or enthralling. People tend to not want to be lectured.

It happens. It's not ideal, but it happens, especially when the message is the point.
And this happens to be one of those books in which the message is the point.

Part of the benefit of this book being a diary is that it provides some cushion between the reader and the author, making the lecture by the author not seem as much like a lecture from the author. Instead, it makes it seem a bit more personal and emotional. You feel for Erin and grow to understand her emotions, questions, and struggles.

She is a character in her own right and not exclusively a mouthpiece or a tool to facilitate a message, which helps.

Part of that is the writing—or, rather, Erin's writing.

She writes really personable lines like:

"Some [families] have two moms, or two dads, or even just one
mom or one dad.
Some even have a whole pack of siblings, like a human
lasagna of brothers and sisters stacked on top of each
other (I love lasagna!)."

Reading her write "I love lasagna" makes her seem more like a real person, even though it is a bit random. Hey, real people have their food preferences. They're allowed to.

Something else about Erin stood out to us: all her discussions about her pet cat, Missy (Full Name: Miss Sweet Cookie Dough). She talks about Missy throughout the book and actually seems to have one of the clearest, most grounded relationships in her life with this scruffy little ex–street cat.

Erin talks about Missy with a kind of uncomplicated certainty that she does not have about anything else. With people, Erin is always juggling mixed feelings, missing pieces, and questions she cannot quite answer. With Missy, things are simple: Missy was hurt, unwanted, and waiting for a very long time, Erin saw her, loved her, and brought her home. That is it. Erin calls Missy her “soul kitty” and describes her routine in so much detail that you can feel that this cat is her safe person in animal form. Missy is the one who sleeps on her bed, listens to her vent, and becomes the comic relief when the journal entries get heavy.

At the same time, the book uses Missy to clarify something really important about adoption. Missy is the one character who actually fits the “rescued” narrative perfectly. She was clearly mistreated and literally saved by Erin’s family. Erin is not. When Erin contrasts Missy’s story with her own, she is quietly teaching the reader that you cannot just copy and paste animal shelter logic onto human adoption. Her parents did not swoop in like heroes to save a broken child, they simply became her parents and she became their daughter. Missy’s presence makes that point land in a kid friendly way. She gives Erin comfort inside the story, and she gives readers a concrete metaphor to help them understand what adoption is and what it is not.

Our favorite moment in the entire book is actually when Erin calls Missy "MSCD." For some reason, we found that so funny. It's like calling your mother-in-law your "MIL."

There are some good lines in here. For example:

"I'm not a lost toy"
"I'm not a donation box"
"I wasn't rescued, I wasn't saved"

On top of being rhetorical and didactic, it gets a bit shouty and ranty, to be brutally honest. Erin's frustration and anger, while understandable, can sometimes be a bit off putting. She sometimes comes across as someone who is perpetually frustrated, triggered, and angry. It's to the point where we wonder if (in the hypothetical scenario that Erin were a housemate, schoolmate, neighbor, or friend) we wouldn't feel like we were stepping on eggshells all the time when around her. Perpetually and easily triggered people tend to drive others away, they come across as people who are at war with everyone else—with the world. They tend to make it seem like everyone has to adjust their life and actions around them and not the other way around. It's just unpleasant.

Anyway, Erin undergoes quite an arc, becoming increasingly more confident, motivated, and driven throughout the book. Her sense of self--her identity--also solidifies. That's nice to see.

Check it out on Amazon!