When I recieved this book as a gift from my brother(see Ken Pierce's Review) I actually cried from happiness. I had no idea he was the one who had taken the battered copy from our family home, and have searched for the last fifteen years for another one. I had finally given up, and simply told my children, "If you never get to read it, you will have missed one of the greatest books ever written." It's re-release is a blessing that I am glad to share with them.

The new addition has a forword by Mary Battenfield which, unfortunately, makes this book sound like a social justice primer. Instead it is a book of love, joy, and laughter in situations that "should" have left the author and her family bitter instead of blessed.

When I first read this book I was too young to truly understand racism, and was simply gripped by the way Mrs. Doss made her children come to life in my mind. I could relate to the children, as their personalities, not their race, gave each a unique voice.

Now that I am an adult, I understand that the Dosses had a wisdom, love, and faith that transcended their culture. The family and the book prove that one doesn't have to preach to change the world. I can truly say that my life is better from having been introduced to both.

Only my closest friends are given the privilege of borrowing this delightfully written true story; the long out-of-print and (before the days of the internet) irreplaceable book has been one of my most closely guarded treasures since childhood. Any family with several small children, of course, will have a store of hilarious anecdotes; children raised with love combine insouciant joy with freedom from adult assumptions and habits of thought, so that any house full of love and children is a house full of unpredictability and laughter. But Helen Doss, unlike most parents, can capture her children in her writing and pass the joy on to us. I don't know anyone who has managed to read the book through without at some point laughing to the point of tears.

But the book is much more than a connection of Readers' Digest anecdotes strung together. Ms. Doss reveals, through deft and honest touches, her own weaknesses and struggles, her impetuosity and her grit. She communicates with power the pain that can come in so many different ways to a woman with a tremendous need to love, especially when obstacles - infertility, unreasonable adoption agencies, poverty - rise up to keep her from satisfying that need. And the portrait of her husband Carl, who changes as much as the children do, is vivid and telling. The Carl who says, "Let's take 'em all" at the end of the book is a very different Carl from the one who agrees to the first adoption largely to humor his wife and to keep her from moping weepily and endlessly about the house, and whose annual refrain for many years is, "This is the last one!" You expect him to come on board, of course; but his path is a bit surprising and most revealing of the essence of the man. In particular his ability to close ranks against outside inteference shows the degree to which his love for his family is as strong as his wife's, however differently it might be expressed.

As a family memoir alone, it would be a classic. But because the children were of mixed racial ancestry - in the 'forties and 'fifties - the Doss family became an unwilling catalyst for the ignorance and prejudice of the time. It is part of the Doss magic that the love in the family was strong enough to triumph over the unpleasant incidents, so that those incidents enriched, rather than poisoned, the Doss childhoods. (Not that this made them less unpleasant, of course.)

The book is never preachy. Nevertheless, it is a vivid documentary of how racism was built into the attitudes of even "nice" people of that time. It is a sermon of a kind, a sermon lived out in the lives of the Doss family. It is a primer on how to overcome evil with good, a standing lesson to a nation still struggling with racial resentment.

But the genuinely remarkable thing is that, despite the frequent intrusions suffered by the family from racially prejudiced outsiders, the book is not about race. No doubt this is because the Doss family was never about race. When the book crosses your mind in the days after you've closed it - and it will, frequently - it will not be as a book about race. It will be as a book about a uniquely special family and about the triumph of love and joy and grace and laughter over whatever might vainly try to overcome them.

I read this book about 30 years ago, when I was in elementary school, and I loved it. I reread it several times, and when I left home, I think Mom sold it in a garage sale. I've thought about it often over the years, and would love to have a copy again, so that I could reread it. I'm amazed that so many other people felt the same way about the book as I did. I can't believe that it's out of print!! What a wonderful story for all time!