Three Juliets, by Minnie Darke

In 1964, aged 16, Claudie Miller was forced to give up her baby for adoption. Sixteen years later the successful designer of children’s clothes receives a diagnosis and begins the search for her lost child. She narrows it down to three candidates – Roisin, Bindi and Miranda – but can Claudie identify her daughter before it’s too late? The tale is told from the perspective of Claudie, in Sydney, in the 1960s and 80s and from that of the three young women - in Adelaide, Brisbane and Sydney - in the 80s, 90s and 2000s. It clearly traces the changing attitudes to adoption and single motherhood over the decades, depicting the horrors of forced adoption and how legal reforms eventually enabled birth families to trace each other. Mothers, both natural and adoptive, get a fairly bad rap in this story – they are depicted as selfish, possessive, controlling or neglectful more than loving, although sometimes that too. It’s complicated and to some extent, realistic. The fashion is fun and an essentially sad story gets an ending that is as happy as is possible.