Robinson, Katy. A single square picture; a Korean adoptee's search for her roots.

Berkley. 297p. illus. c2002. 0-425-18496-X. $13.95 JSA*

The single square picture of the title is a Polaroid shot of Katy Robinson when she was Kim Ji-yun, age seven, standing between her mother and her grandmother at the airport in Seoul, Korea. As Robinson says so bluntly, "the next day I was Catherine Jeanne Robinson living in Salt Lake City, Utah." One of over 100,000 Korean adoptees, so numerous that they refer to themselves as "KA's," Katy Robinson grew up in a Roman Catholic family in Salt Lake City, the only Asian child in her school and neighborhood. A journalist by training, the now 27-year-old Robinson chronicles her adult search for her birth family, a quest that leads her back to Korea, eventually to stay a year on a scholarship to learn the Korean language and culture about which she had been taught nothing.

In A Single Square Picture, the author is both an investigative reporter and a young woman caught between cultures and loyalties, between the independence and self-assertivenes she learned as an American and the deferential role expected of her by her Korean male relatives. Married to a Caucasian who accompanies her to Seoul, and extremely close to her adoptive mother, Katy struggles to understand her birth father, a difficult, secretive man, and to establish relationship with her older half-brother. There is no Cinderella ending here. Robinson leaves Korea after a year, still unsure of her birth mother's whereabouts, still haunted by the vagaries of her "twisting family tree." She has, however, written a lyric memoir that gives valuable insights into the mind and feelings of a woman of two cultures. Patricia A. Moore, Brookline, MA