Daniel Asa Rose has a way of catch­ing the char­ac­ter and per­son­al­i­ty of his sub­jects with sim­ple, pass­ing moments of insight. For exam­ple, here he is writ­ing about Mary, his cousin Larry’s mid­dle-aged, over­weight, non– Eng­lish speak­ing mail-order bride: ​“Pfffft! Mary has opened anoth­er Coke can for Lar­ry. The mir­a­cle of car­bon­a­tion seems to catch­er by sur­prise every time.” Ulti­mate­ly, it is Rose’s pow­er of obser­va­tion, at once bit­ing and com­pas­sion­ate, that lies at the heart of this book, mak­ing it sen­ti­men­tal and insis­tent­ly real­is­tic at the same time. 

The title reveals the plot: Rose’s black sheep cousin Lar­ry enlists the author in a life­sav­ing earch for a replace­ment kid­ney. Their quest lands them in ​“inscrutable” Chi­na, where they have the dan­ger, and thrill, of skirt­ing the law in order to save Larry’s life, which is the emo­tion-packed heart­stringspulling piece of the book. Through­out the book, Rose’s guard­ed sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty (what he calls ​“naiveté”) is pit­ted against cer­tain bit­ter and eye-open­ing truths, lend­ing the book its cred­i­bil­i­ty and integri­ty as a work that deals with our com­plex human nature. Even­tu­al­ly, Rose’s bub­ble of naiveté is popped, and he is robbed of the ​“altru­is­tic” and hall­mark-card-fuzzy feel­ings that his great act of kind­ness might have spi­raled into. It is this mix of bit­ter­sweet real­i­ty and Rose’s unfail­ing humor that makes the book mean­ing­ful and, most of all, enjoyable.