Memoir is not my favourite genre, but I read and liked this one because Beth Powning is one of my favourite authors. I think there's a lot of honesty in this story about how Ms Powning becomes a mother of two children - what she gains and loses in the process. It's not all happiness, with the stillbirth of her first child being the major sadness and focus of the book. There is, however, much more to the story than just the stillbirth, with a constant tension between Powning's role as a wife and mother and her own career aspirations as a writer. Having read this memoir which focuses on mother and son in the 20th century, it's interesting to look now at the Powning family, as revealed through their web site: http://www.powning.com/ I read in "Shadow Child" about how she felt like a failure in comparison with other women and with her husband, how she felt as her son left home to an uncertain future with doubts about what her relationship with him would be in the future . . . and then I read on her web site that last month she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters by the University of New Brunswick, and that her son now lives nearby and shares a web site with Beth. Clearly when she wrote this book she underestimated her own value. ( )