Somebody's Baby

Somebody's Baby offers a stirring look at destiny and adoption, legacy and the power of true love. In 1959, if you lived in a wealthy Jewish neighborhood in Kansas City, gentile boys were off-limits. Especially a boy with tattoos, a drifter from California who had spent time in jail, who worked in a gas station, and who would fight a man for looking at you the wrong way. Jenny Jaffe knew the rules, but when she saw Will McDonald for the first time, everything she knew about right and wrong disappeared. What was left was a passionate, once-in-a-lifetime love that no social constraints could hold. Will and Jenny became inseparable, in every way, and by the end of Jenny's senior year in high school, she was pregnant. They made a plan to run away; Jenny waited at the spot where Will was to pick her up but he never showed. What follows is the story of true love that spans three decades - between man and woman, parent and child. Jenny is forced to give up her baby for adoption, and when that child, Claudia, becomes a parent herself she begins a search for her biological parents at the risk of destroying the love of the adoptive parents who have raised her.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction, Romance. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.