Shadow Child is a beautifully wrought exploration of selfhood, womanhood, and mother hood, and of the way life hones, pares, and humbles each of us. It is an affirmation that we are shaped by our pain as surely as we are shaped by our joy, and that there is beauty in both.

Nothing prepared Beth Powning for the death of her child.

Not even the summer she spent as a rebellious young woman working with a youth group in a village in Mexico. A baby died, and Powning, 18 years old, from a middle-class, North American culture, went to the funeral. Walking into the tiny house with a dirt floor and a fire in the middle, she noticed a cradle with a doll in it. The family was waving flies away and caressing it. With shock, she realized it was their baby.

Seven years later, Powning gave birth to a stillborn son. There was no cause of death. She never saw her child; no lock of hair, no foot-print, no memorial marked his passing. Tate, she called him, and she and her husband left the maternity ward where she had lain recovering, surrounded by happy mothers, and returned home, bewildered and numb. A few weeks later, a plain brown carton arrived in the mail. It was her baby's ashes.

Powning went on to have a healthy baby boy. But Tate's memory never left her, "insubstantial as a shadow, casting a vague, disturbing chill across the sunny places of my heart," the New Brunswick author and photographer writes in her haunting new memoir, "Shadow Child: An apprenticeship in Love and Loss."