Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Transracial adoption is one of those topics where

you kind of hope for a nice and neat storybook ending, but that's rarely what ends up happening.

Journalist Erica Hayasaki probably knows that better than most. She's got a new nonfiction book

out called Somewhere Sisters,

and she tells the story of three women, two of whom are twin sisters, who take different

roots to end up in the care of an affluent white family just outside of Chicago. Now, families

adopting kids from so-called developing countries can often be seen as well-intentioned.

But Hayasaki tells us here and now as Deepa Fernandez that adoption doesn't necessarily give you a better life, just a different one.

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This message comes from heavyweight. Maybe you've laid awake and imagined how it could have been,

how it might be, but the moment to act was never right. Well, the moment is here,

and the podcast making it happen is heavyweight with Jonathan Goldstein, available wherever you

get podcasts. A new book probes the difficulties of transracial adoption, a scene through the eyes

of identical twin girls born in Vietnam in the late 1990s.

One twin was adopted by a white American couple, the Soleimini's.

They named her Isabella.

The other twin was brought up by her maternal aunt in Vietnam, whose partner named her Ha.

Ha and Isabella were eventually reunited in the United States, but struggled to feel a

connection, having led such different lives. Journalist and professor Erica Hayasaki followed

Isabella, Ha, and Isabella's adopted sister, Olivia, for five years. She tells their story

...