Throwaway Daughter

Has anyone read this book, Throwaway Daughter? I hadn't heard of it before, but here's a review I found:

I read this book with a mixture of fascination and horror. The author of Throwaway Daughter, Ting-Xing Le, lived through the Cultural Revolution in China and worked as a translator before defecting to the West. (Her life story is told in her memoir A Leaf in the Bitter Wind.)

Throwaway Daughter, however, is a novel about a Chinese girl adopted to Canada who goes back to look for her Chinese family. The American Library Association listed it on its Best Books for Young Adults, but I would warn parents against giving this volume to children. Parents should read it first and then decide whether to read it together with their older child.

In the book the protagonist, Grace Dong-mei, is nineteen and an adopted Chinese-Canadian. Most Chinese-American adoptees are still children. The book says that adoption from China to Canada occurred before adoption from China to the U.S. became common. I cannot vouch for that. . . .

However, a novel can bring emotional understanding that nonfiction cannot. Perhaps it would be valuable to teen adoptees for that reason. The strength of this book is that chapters are written from alternating points of view including those of Grace, her adoptive mother, her birth mother, her birthfather, her paternal grandfather, and an orphanage worker. This is the first book I have seen that gives voice to a birth father and birth grandfather, fleshing out the circumstances leading to their actions, although it is hard to sympathize with these two characters.

It doesn't sound like something for my kids yet, but I'm posting about it for others who might be interested. I'd like to hear opinions from those who have read it before I buy it for myself.