This is the first book of Lisa Alther's I've read, it won't be the last. This book is full of well researched facts, and Lisa's view of life is very enjoyable.

....woman searches for her DNA ancestry in Appalachia and discovers roots to Portugal, Jewish, Native American heritage - which is not expected since her family culturally identify as Scottish protestant.

I love the way this is written and the humor. It reads so quickly and comes across as an honest re-telling of her experience at each step of the way. It helps me to find surprises and interesting turns in my own DNA ancestry - and that there is no need to try and figure out "how" or "why" information got lost...just focus on your own findings and mostly this brings joy and satisfaction.

And for Lisa Alther -a book!

I initially picked up this book because there was a review by Doris Lessing and so I knew it had to be good. I was concerned about reading a memoir that was going to drag me into the mud of someone else's confusion (claiming universal insight along the way); but nope! This was enjoyable, fun, and i definitely recommend to others to read this book.

Part memoir of growing up in eastern TN, part author's search for her family's history, who may or may not be Melungeon (a historically isolated group in the area that was known for dark skin, six fingers, etc.). There is a lot of interesting southeastern US history here (the Spanish rampaging through bringing diseases and pigs, the different Indian groups and how they dealt with traders, colonists, etc.), including some surprising scenarios suggested to account for the Melungeons and other mixed race groups - and at the end of the book, DNA testing shows that some of the improbable histories (or something similar) must have happened. Cool.

Some fun stuff on religion and social class (and race) in the south, too.

I picked this up almost reflexively, after all, I've loved Alther's fiction and I'm a big fan of the memoir. However, this meandering philosophical search for Alther's genetic heritage didn't suit me at all.

To be fair, I do have a dog in this particular hunt. I suspect that because my own child's parentage will always be 50% unknowable mystery, I bristle a little when people assign importance to ancestry. I tend to err on the side of who you are does matter and who your ancestors were doesn't, so once Alther began to explain how hugely important knowing particulars of her heritage is to her, she began to lose me.

I found much of the book to be wildly discursive and only intermittently interesting. It just wasn't for me, though I think that the more genealogically inclined would dig it.