Black Rainbow

Two narrators share this novel, and its opening premise is unsettling: a woman abducts a pregnant mother, kills her, and raises the newborn as her own. Authorities later return the baby to her birth family and bring the killer to trial. The book asks what becomes of a child raised under such circumstances, and whether a bond could ever form between that child and the woman who took her.

The story begins in the late 1960s with Rania, the kidnapped infant, now a teenager in New Jersey. Her school offers little beyond her friendship with Monique, a magnetic and restless classmate. Rania's Armenian family background hints at a troubled past, and as she pieces together the story of her birth, Monique urges her to look for the woman who killed her mother. Monique has troubles of her own, however, and after a peace rally she vanishes. Rania sets out to find her with help from Michael, a streetwise boy who is both guide and boyfriend, and their search carries them through a surreal Lower East Side of Manhattan. There the novel shifts into magical realism in a warehouse of light shows, music and magic theater that the characters call Babylon, a place of transformation.

The second narrator is Mary Rose, a young woman from a rural town outside Albuquerque. Miscarriages and infertility push her toward a breaking point, and after a brief kidnapping of a child, her marriage begins to fall apart. Her crime lands her in a mental institution, where a fellow patient becomes her mentor and her slow recovery begins. Her later life takes her to a remote Benedictine monastery and then to a job at a spa in northern New Mexico, where she lives in a trailer. Her longing for a child grows stronger than her grip on reality.

Both women find their sense of self bound up in the broken relationship between mother and child. The novel suggests that each is missing part of herself, and that they can only become whole by facing one another.