Spell Roma Backwards is Debbie Barrow Michael’s tender, grief-soaked continuation of her family’s story with Roma, the spirited Russian boy she adopted after what she describes as a direct call from God. The book follows Roma from his magnetic childhood into the turbulent years of young adulthood, through rebellion, rehab, radiant faith, reunion with his birth family, and finally his devastating death after a fall. What begins as an adoption memoir becomes something larger and stranger: a meditation on obedience, motherhood, divine mystery, and the way love keeps speaking after loss.

I was moved by how unwilling the book is to flatten Roma into either a miracle child or a cautionary tale. He’s charming, maddening, funny, impulsive, tender, and impossible to contain. I kept thinking about the boy who forgives Rocky again and again, inviting him to play baseball even after being bullied, and then the young man who can turn a punishment into “a nice adventure” after walking to practice in the rain. Those moments make the later darkness hurt more, because the reader has already fallen for him. Michael writes motherhood with an aching honesty I admired. She doesn’t pretend that faith made parenting simple. Her “tough love” is full of trembling. Her prayers are sometimes brave and sometimes desperate. That felt true to me.

The writing has the intimate, gathering quality of testimony, and at its best, it glows with lived-in detail: the lonely basketball hoop, the pink roses blooming where they shouldn’t, the eerie repetition of the number seven, the taxi in Georgia filling with Beatles songs while two families, divided by language and history, sing through tears. This is about a mother trying to make meaning without reducing pain, trying to keep hold of God and her son at the same time. The idea at the heart of the book, that Roma spelled backward becomes amor, lands not like a clever title but like a hard-won benediction.

By the end, I felt less as though I had read a neatly shaped memoir than as though I had been entrusted with a family’s sacred archive. Spell Roma Backwards is sorrowful, searching, and unexpectedly bright, a book about a son who could not be managed, explained, or forgotten. It closes with grief still breathing, but also with gratitude strong enough to stand beside it. I’d recommend it especially to readers drawn to Christian memoirs, adoption stories, testimonies of loss and faith, and books that treat grief not as something to solve, but as something love learns to carry.

Pages: 307 | ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0DPDX3Q4Y