Customer Reviews

They Called Me Bunny

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I enjoyed this book immensely because it carved out a whole new world for me to see - the world of adoption and its effects on children,teenagers, and parents. The colorful setting of San Francisco in the 1950s and the social issues of the time are a wonderful backdrop to the relationship problems of regular, everyday families where one child of a different race has been adopted. The chararacters are genuine, well and deeply crafted, and the details of daily life make vivid and sensory pictures. It's a real page-turner with twists and turns to keep things interesting. I think everyone can relate to its issues of identity in a very personal and profound way. This story stays with you and gives you warm feelings inside...

This is a heartrending story about an adopted girl who tries to find her lost identity in an era when society withheld information about birth parents. Set in beat era San Francisco, it is also a sexual and intellectual coming of age novel that follows dark-skinned "Bunny"--the protagonist's name given her by her Caucasian adoptive parents--from childhood to young adulthood. Bunny's conventional parents have little empathy with their adopted daughter's quest to know her past. Mary Parks employs a voice perfectly suited to her characters and the times, which is often politically incorrect yet accurate. Bunny's close relationship with her artist girlfriend, Cork, portrays the social friction between upper and lower middle class milieus and contemporary issues of female sexuality and pregnancy, and their consequences for women. Parks creates great dramatic tension surrounding Bunny's struggles with the adoption agency that withholds the documents containing the secrets to Bunny's past, and also by the use of the protagonist's repressed memory that gradually surfaces. Where a less courageous character might have given up, and despite a deep-set insecurity, Bunny has the desire and tenacity to persist in her efforts to unlock her past.

This story will be a compelling ride not only for Native Americans who were adopted, but for all children and parents who have struggled with the complex emotions and problems of adoption.

This book's conversational style drew me in from the first sentence. The author really "got" the stifling atmosphere of the 1950's and what it was like to be a teenager then. I found I really cared about Bunny as I accompanied her on her self-discovery journey. Along the way, I learned much I never knew about adoption, especially in reference to the Native American community, as I enjoyed a story well told by Mary Anderson Parks.

I was personally drawn to this story as an adoptee-and once I'd read the first chapter I tore thru the book.
Ms Anderson Parks goes deeply into the heart and mind of a young native american adoptee with such honestly and strength that you feel (or at least I did) that you are living this girls life-which the experience that I always want from a good book. To be sucked in to a new world and emotionally changed-which is what this book did for me.

This is an intriguing book about a young girl adopted in the early 1950s at a time when children from Native American backgrounds were adopted by white families.
It gives a fascinating window into a world that many of us have no knowledge of - how it might feel to not know one's lineage. It is Bunny's struggle to find her roots and also an identity that makes sense for her. I felt a strong connection with this story and the author is writing from a real understanding of these sort of situations. I enjoyed reading the book right through to the end and was not disappointed in the ending - It left me with a desire to know more about this new chapter of her life that comes into focus only in the last few pages. Highly recommended