Unearthing: A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets by Kyo Maclear is about a woman who finds out the man who raised her was not her biological dad. In December 2018, three months after her father’s death, Kyo receives DNA results that shows that someone else is her biological dad. Kyo feels completely unmoored by the discovery and feels her life is unraveling. She starts to question her entire identity.
Kyo decides to try and figure out who her father is. She tries to get her mother to open up and tell her the truth. However, Kyo finds that her mother is not forthcoming even though her mother is dying of cancer.
I was excited to read the book but my interest started to wane at many points of the story. I found it confusing when the author would jump back and forth in the book. It was hard to keep track of the events and felt the book was all over the place. I also found the book to be overly wordy and boring. It would be too descriptive on certain events and it was exhausting to read after a while. The author would repeat some of the same ideas several times. I thought the book would reveal a bunch of family secrets and have many twists but the main secret was her biological father was kept a secret from her.
I was more than 90% finished with the book before I decided that it was too boring to continue. I didn’t understand the connection that the author was trying to make with her relationships with her love for plants to her relationship with her family. I am sure a general connection could be said of any relationship. Overall, I am very disappointed in the book.
