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BLOOD MATTERS is a story of the complex world of adoption. Individuals who are adopted may have adoptive parents who are kind or abusive. The adoptees vary in whether or not they want to know who their biological parents are, and if they have biological siblings. Those who seek to follow the course of adoption also have many reasons to do so. They may be young girls who become pregnant and are forced to put their baby up for adoption. Others seek to adopt because they can’t have children, or they carry a defective gene that they do not wish to pass on to another generation. And, there are those who have gone through the expensive fertility treatments and want to save others from having to do the same by sharing any extra sperm or eggs that they have left over. All have in common deep emotions that could, under the right circumstances, find a horrifying release. All areas of adoption today, given the ever-changing laws, are a minefield of emotions and desires. A murder mystery, in the hands of the right writer, could be an on-the-edge-of-your-chair experience. Alas, this one is not. The story plods along with tired, and what now is becoming trite, ranting such as speaking of women policemen as if women think it is great that they are on the police force and men do not. There is too much “we women are downtrodden” which gets very tiresome. Or there's Officer Selena Sanchez described as a poor girl who became an EMT then a policeman instead of going to medical school because she didn’t think that was an option. Even so, the author makes all her women police seem to talk and think like men. Even the main character, Roxanne Prescott, comes across as a man. Fortunately several times throughout the novel the author reminds us Roxanne is a woman. The story also suffers in the beginning of the novel from descriptions which smack of padding rather than evoking a feeling or memory. Later the author goes off-story to fantasize about ways the main character’s family could be hurt or killed, which appears to be put in merely to add false excitement to a story that has none so far. It's not until page 157 that the story picks up its pace. However, the reader is given another maddening digression on thoughts of the main character’s family just when suspense is building. Lastly, by page 166, the reader is given a litany of examples of adoptions, rather than being shown examples by using the many actual families and characters that populate the story. I have liked Taffy Cannon’s stories in the past, but this unfortunately is not one of her best, and I particularly dislike the character of the protagonist used here.
Reviewed by Ginger K. W. Stratton, January 2007
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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