“Ohlmann reveals herself to be a brave soul who reaches for the light while never turning from the dark. Her story sparkles with such insight and honesty, gutsy humor and restrained (midwestern) bravado, I felt bereft when I had to turn the last page and leave her.”
— Beverly Donofrio, author of Riding in Cars with Boys and Astonished
“I was moved and awed by Ohlmann’s honesty about the deep pain surrounding her adoption, her ability to take me from a choral performance (that goes gastrically awry) to her mother’s table—which you better be at by 5:30—to Nebraska’s multitudinous sandhill cranes (those cranes!). Although we couldn’t be much more different on paper, I couldn’t have related more.”
— Patricia Resnick, screenwriter of 9 to 5, Straight Talk, and Better Things
By the end of Shadow Migration: Mapping a Life, I felt a kind of circularity, as though coming back to this land was also part of this search for family, like Ohlmann’s own circle of kinship could extend past both biological and adoptive family, and maybe even beyond the human realm, too.
— Melissa Oliveira, Hippocampus Magazine.
“What’s unique about Suzanne Ohlmann’s Shadow Migration is the way in which she brings the many layers of her identity into the urgent search for her source. Ohlmann is an adoptee searching for a birthday do-over with migrating cranes, but she is also a musician and a nurse, a lover and a wife, a Nebraskan and a world traveler, a woman suffering from depression and a really good friend. I’d follow her anywhere.”
—Jill Christman, author of Darkroom: A Family Exposure