Borrowed Child by Marguerite Welch

 

After the drug overdose of her teenage son, Helen, a privileged white woman, takes in Mia, a troubled and undocumented Mexican teenager.

Although they initially fill each other’s voids, Helen’s lofty expectations of Mia eventually test that bond and Mia, tortured by guilt and starved for affection, runs off with Diego, an MS13 gang leader. While Helen, bereft over losing another child, tries to reconstruct her life, Mia’s life with Diego spirals into a nightmare: Just after she has his baby, he goes to jail for multiple murders. As each woman moves forward through her own challenges, Helen confronts her deep-seated prejudices, while Mia battles her own demons in search of self-identity and meaning in her life.

A haunting and suspenseful cautionary tale, Borrowed Child is about what happens when a well-meaning inclination toward “salvation” goes awry.

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Amazon.com: Borrowed Child: A Story of Parenting Across Two Cultures: 9798896363422: Welch, Marguerite: Books

Marguerite Welch is a writer, artist, photographer and sailor whose essays and reviews on fine art photography have been published in the NEW ART EXAMINER, WASHINGTON REVIEW OF THE ARTS, AFTERIMAGE and other local and national art publications. Short personal essays and travel pieces have appeared in BAY WEEKLY, WANDERLUST and CHESAPEAKE BAY MAGAZINE. Her travel memoir, WATERBORNE: A SLOW TRIP AROUND A SMALL PLANET, published by Seaworthy Publications in September 2019, documents a 14-year world circumnavigation undertaken with her husband in their 38-foot sailboat Ithaca. In her spare time she tends her garden on the banks of the Severn River in Annapolis, Maryland where she and her husband have lived for 40 years.