They suffer in silence when they shouldn’t have to. But kids are kids-they’re secretive little critters. I hope he or she will not feel in any way uncomfortable about those wonderings, and will feel comfortable talking to Nathan and Griffin and I about them. I would be very surprised if he or she didn’t wonder about them at some point.

But every kid has a birth family, so I know that family will always be part of my kid’s life in some way (even though, as in Milo’s case, the chances of our ever knowing anything about that first mother and father will be very slim). No two children are alike, so I have no way of knowing whether our Chinese son or daughter will have the same questions and secret musings that Milo does. A lens-not the only one, but an important one-through which Milo views the world. However, when I chose the makeup of the family that ran the inn, it meant adoption would be part of the story.

I didn’t want the story to be specifically and only about adoption, so it isn’t just as I don’t imagine the experiences of every child who came to his or her family in this way are forever and always about adoption. Out of those musings and the many hours of reading and study we spent to prepare for our adoption came Milo and Nora and Ben Pine. I began writing Greenglass House in the summer of 2012, and I was still thinking (as I imagine I often will) about adoptive families and what ours might be like. If you’ve read my last book, The Broken Lands, you might be thinking now about Jin, and the speech Liao gives her atop the Brooklyn Bridge. It probably won’t surprise you to know that Jin grew from what was supposed to be a secondary character into a main character at the time that Nathan and I were beginning that process. Among the many topics we read about and discussed were questions of identity and family and culture and heritage. We began studying, both on our own and with our adoption agency as part of the home study, a required stage of the process. The truth is that there were a lot of factors involved in our decision to adopt. We chose China because we had an interest in the culture and history. It wasn’t a question of infertility, something we’ve had to explain now and then since the birth of our first child, Griffin, in 2013, when acquaintances are surprised to find we’re still in the adoption pipeline.

In 2011, my husband and I decided to begin the process of international adoption. But the ARC doesn’t have a note at all (chalk that up to Stuff That Didn’t Get Done Due to Griffin) and I’d like to note a few things for the sake of early readers of this book who might be curious about Milo and his family. This is not the final text of the Greenglass House author’s note, by any stretch. I suppose I should point out the use of “an” in the title.

Greenglass house book