Book Review: Behind the Scenes

Title: Behind the Scenes 

Author: Deena Adams

Date: 2021

Publisher: Deena Adams

Quote: "Did they leave him alone again?...The big black bags--the ones Daddy used for work and said never to touch--were missing."

This is a best-case adoption story. A couple come to the city to open an urban mission. They've tried and tried to have a baby, and don't have one. And right away they meet a little boy whose parents are too busy with their drug-smuggling business to want to be parents. Except for the loss of the fourth maybe-baby for the woman who wants to adopt little Clayton, everything goes perfectly. 

This short, sweet, feel-good novelette is the prequel to a longer novel. Little Clayton, who was adopted in the 1990s, grows up and falls in love. 

Christian content? No "altar call" scene or conversions of unbelievers, but we see the characters praying and going to church. 

This is a nice, clear, simple story. If you don't want to bother with a lot of subplots and details and commentary, you'll enjoy this one. Adoptions usually aren't as smooth as Clayton's, as a character observes in the novel, but once in a while they are.

If you like Behind the Scenes, free of charge, will you want to buy a full-length book about the next generation of the family? I'm not drawn to the author's description of the longer novel, but you might be. The characters in this book don't go very far beyond the stereotypes prevented in Sunday School training for "peer counselling," but they have been envisioned as individual people--based partly on real, consenting people. Clayton doesn't only have big eyes and act grateful for a cheap toy; he eats dry Cheerios by the handful when his parents have left him to get his own breakfast and neglected to buy milk, he wipes his nose on his shirt when he wants to finish a game while having an asthma attack--he's not  a fantasy of the perfect child, but drawn from observation of real children.