DeFrees has a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Virginia and a law degree from the University of Texas and is a published writer and an editor. In the following essay, DeFrees discusses author Evans's use of personal experience to bring a more evocative understanding of, and to make a more resonant argument in support of, female children adopted from China.

How does an author meld the contradiction of the vast sorrow of losing a child with the joy of gaining a new life? One effective method is through a careful distillation of fact and personal experience. In Karin Evans's history, The Lost Daughters of China, she writes a factual, nonfiction account of the adoption process for United States would-be parents to adopt female babies from orphanages in China. However, her account carries with it the weight of circumstance—Evans herself is an adoptive parent...