No Biking in the House Without a Helmet by Melissa Fay Greene

The chapters devoted to the adoption of this child-originally called Christian, later renamed Jesse-are the most engaging in this lively book. Still full of doubt and telling herself she is only doing research for the article, she travels to a Bulgarian orphanage to meet the four-year-old boy who will become her first adopted child. “Were the agencies trying to inform or to deceive? Hi Forever Mommy and Daddy! My name is Vladimir! I am a sociopath with big blue eyes who loves teddy bears, herring, and arson!” Greene snags a magazine assignment on doctors who specialize in evaluating children for international adoption, hoping to glean knowledge for her own quest. “The write-ups sounded like the Sky Mall catalog,” she writes. In the wry, breezy tone she employs throughout the book, she conveys the fraught uncertainty of sizing up a neglected, institutionalized youngster from half a world away, with nothing more to go on than an agency’s description.

Greene-a two-time finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the bestselling author of Praying for Sheetrock, the story of a civil-rights struggle in small-town Georgia-began her search for a child on the Internet.

No Biking in the House tells the story of how her family ultimately welcomed five new children-a son from Bulgaria, and three sons and a daughter from Ethiopia-and found their lives “enlivened and enriched” in the process.

After a miscarriage at age forty-five, Greene decided to seek a child through the complex process of international adoption, with her husband’s encouragement and her own considerable investigative skills. For Greene, however, the prospect of being home alone after her four children grew up was not a happy one. As Greene writes in her new memoir, No Biking in the House without a Helmet, “Donny and I feel most alive, most thickly in the cumbersome richness of life, with children underfoot.” Plenty of couples say the same when their children actually are underfoot but nevertheless look forward to an empty nest and the intermittent joy of grandchildren. Journalist Melissa Fay Greene and her attorney husband, Don Samuel, are the sort of people who truly love living in a full house.

No Biking in the House Without a Helmet by Melissa Fay Greene