The central story of Ting-Xing Ye’s ambitious novel involves that quintessential adolescent quest to discover “Who am I?” Ye, born in Shanghai, and now living in Orillia, Ontario, is the author of an acclaimed memoir and three children’s books.

For most of her life, teenage Grace Parker has adamantly rejected her Chinese origins. Left on the steps of a Chinese orphanage, she was adopted by a Canadian couple, Jane and Kevin Parker, who attempt to get Grace interested in her roots. Grace’s first-person narration packs an emotional wallop, Ye sharply capturing her aggressive defensiveness, sarcastic defiance, and angry hurt.

Grace is only one of several first-person narrators, as Ye aims to provide a panoramic perspective on the historical and political reasons for Grace’s abandonment – mainly, the one-child population policy that’s been in practice since 1980 in China, where the preferred sex of a baby is male. However, what Ye gains in scope, she loses in intimacy, since Throwaway Daughter tips toward being more subject- rather than character- driven, more history lesson than historical witness. The novel is structured as a series of theatrical dramatic monologues by Grace and her Canadian and Chinese families from 1980 to 1999.

Over time, Grace softens in her attitudes toward her origins (a change only cursorily shown) and decides to attend business school in China, in order to track down her birth mother. While Grace’s adoptive parents are simplistically drawn, well-meaning liberals, the voices and characterizations of her grandfather, Old Revolutionary Chen, and her birth parents, Loyal and Chun-Mei, are as gripping and complex as Grace’s. Like Grace, they are a bundle of mixed motives, loyalties, and uncertainties. All of them reveal their roles in, and views on, the events that led to Grace’s abandonment, compassionately illuminating how the shaping hand of history can also be a stranglehold.