Anyone who enjoys reading gripping personal interest stories with the ability to make readers cry one moment and jump up and cheer the next will adore DOES SHE THINK OF ME. And those who believe concepts like “family love” are dead in this day and age will be proved utterly mistaken.

For a woman who never intended to share an account of the raw, private details inherent in giving up a child for adoption as a teen with anyone but that child–should she be lucky enough to someday locate her–author Cathy Williams-Thrun has produced a masterpiece of a memoir likely to touch the hearts of everyone, including people who have never been parents, and perhaps even including people who no longer believe in love. “For nineteen years and eight months (7178.3 days, 620,205,120 seconds) I internally grieved the loss of my first born” she pens, laying her heart bare on the eve of potentially reuniting with the daughter only surreptitiously glimpsed once, before the tiny infant was whisked away into the halls of organized adoption processes. And by this time the reader is equally invested in how the long-yearned-for reunion will go. Will it happen, or will the now 19-year-old Kelly or her adoptive parents have second thoughts about opening such a potentially painful door? And if reconnecting with the daughter she gave away to another family does happen, will it go well? How has Kelly felt all these years about having a birth-mother, birth-father, and biological sisters she’s never met?

At times stunning in its simplicity, DOES SHE THINK OF ME reveals just how excruciating it was for Williams-Thrun to have quite a large extended family, none of whom offered her frightened 17-year-old self the kind of support that would have helped her keep her first child. (Or, to be more factual, no offers she actually got to hear.) Instead, her own mother–struggling with mental health issues–and her own father, who was struggling to stay sober, moved their immediate family from Newfoundland to Calgary in order to avoid the “badge of shame” teen pregnancies still insured in the 1970s, even though Williams-Thrun’s baby daddy was actually the love of her life, whom she did later marry and bear two other legally-sanctioned daughters with. Could different choices have been made? Perhaps. Can the people involved in this real life tale forgive themselves and each other for the choices that were made? Pick up a copy of this powerfully moving memoir and find out.

DOES SHE THINK OF ME by Cathy Williams-Thrun is a resoundingly wonderful, touching, soulful look at the personal issues involved in adopted children and birth parents refinding each other. Keep tissues handy.

~C.S. Holmes for IndieReader