Your Personal History is False

Many children's deepest fear is learning their putative parents are not really their parents: they were secretly adopted; they were stolen as children; they were swapped at birth by mistake; or their parents have just lied to them. Numerous well-known children's movies revolve around a variation on this theme. For Kay Fischer, this fear appears to be realized in the novel. As an adult, Kay has lived her entire life being told that her father was Hugh Paget, an Englishman missionary teacher, who died just a few months after she was born. Kay's mother, Annaliese Leys Fischer, tells Kay that all photographic and documentary evidence of her father was destroyed in a fire. All that remains is a single, grainy photograph of a nondescript fair-haired man that is taken far enough away that few details are discernable. Subsequent to Paget's death, Annaliese remarried Rudolf...