deird1 | (Reply)

From:

She's also really harsh toward people who adopt kids and then don't treat them well. In The Mirror Crack'd, a wealthy actress can't have biological children so she adopts a few kids. Then when the actress gets pregnant, she jettisons the kids. One of them, as an adult, says the actress did the worse thing possible in letting them believe she loved them and then showing it was a lie.

There's also a book (Murder With Mirrors I think) in which the adopted kid gets treated significantly better than the biological one because the parents are so worried about the adopted child feeling less worthy for being adopted. This, of course, makes the biological child REALLY resent the adopted one.

Adoption just never seems to go well in Christie's books, but I can't figure out half the time if she's saying that it's impossible to love adopted children as much as biological children (and that therefore it's unfair to promise an adopted child you can), or if she's exploring and critiquing attitudes about adoption that were more common in her day and we've forgotten.