Grace Lin,
The Red Thread: An Adoption Fairy Tale
Albert Whitman & Company, 2007.

Ages 4-8

The first and last page of Grace Lin’s latest picture book, The Red Thread, depicts a contemporary mom and dad with their adopted child of Asian ancestry. The child requests her favorite story be read yet again and the mother’s reading of the fairy tale commences. Opening with an old chestnut for fictional kings and queens, the book begins with a royal couple aching for a child of their own. Spinning from their hearts is a red thread which pulls and twists, causing great and inexplicable pain.  Another stock fairy tale figure appears, an itinerant peddler, who urges, “You both must find out who or what is pulling on the other end.”

Lin’s bright, colorful gouache paintings and her technique of using dark outlines around her subjects lend a medieval, stained glass feel to her illustrations which perfectly suits the fairy tale motif in this story. Readers familiar with her previous books, of which there are more than twenty, will recognize her signature illustrative swirls in the skies and seas of this book. The metaphor of the red thread, a Chinese belief that those destined for marriage are linked by an invisible thread, is poignantly reinterpreted by Lin to fit the theme of adoption. The thread is an apt symbol of the intensity and strength, regardless of time, place or circumstance, of the parent-child connection. One of the most moving illustrations shows the king and queen desperately trying to untangle the thread while a gale-force wind whips it round and round a tree.

The book does not attempt to address any of the complexities of international, transracial adoption, but instead uses the image of the tugging red thread to emphasize the strong pull of parenthood and the often long, emotional journey that those who adopt undergo to answer it. Guided across sand, sea and land by wrinkled elders and friendly villagers, the king and queen follow the pull of the red thread; readers will be delighted by the package awaiting the royal couple at its other end.  The Red Thread is a sensitively-spun yarn that will tug on everyone’s heartstrings.

Kristen O. Daniel
November 2007