Category: Female Adoptees
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The Goodbye Baby: A Diary about Adoption
by Elaine Pinkerton
Anyone who was adopted or who has adopted a child will find The Goodbye Baby a comforting and inspiring read. It takes one on a journey through the thorny issues of adoption, a search for healing, and an inspiring finale. Adoptee Author: Elaine Pinkerton Publication Year: 2012…
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Spot the Terrorist!
by Lori Jakiela
Lori Jakiela’s Spot the Terrorist! takes the reader on flights through the ordinary-turned-extraordinary, where the everyday experiences of a flight attendant become something much stranger and wilder. Adoptee Author: Lori Jakiela Publication Year: 2012 Critical Reviews Adoptee Reviews: Other Reviews: All Bookshop and Amazon links on this…
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The Bridge to Take When Things Get Serious
by Lori Jakiela
Her 70-year-old, cancer-stricken mother kills snakes with a broom. Her best friend believes in psychics and the Virgin Mary. Her new neighbor steals her CDs and her aunt sneaks cheese curls into the house. After seven years in New York, Lori Jakiela gives up her…
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Miss New York Has Everything
by Lori Jakiela
Her aunt was a nun who popped pills and did time in Narcotics Anonymous. Her father grew up during the Depression, believed he’d be the next Frank Sinatra, and ended up working in the mills. His daughter, Lori Jakiela, spent her suburban Pittsburgh childhood watching…
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Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe
by Lori Jakiela
Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe is a book about mapping lives–the lives we are born with and the lives we are allowed to make for ourselves. Belief is part adoption narrative and part meditation on family, motherhood, nature vs. nurture, and what…
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Prison Baby: A Memoir
by Deborah Jiang-Stein
Even at twelve years old Deborah Jiang-Stein, the adopted daughter of a progressive Jewish couple in Seattle, felt like an outsider. Her multiracial features set her apart from her well-intentioned white parents, who evaded questions about her past. But when Deborah discovered a letter revealing…
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My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family’s Nazi Past
by Jennifer Teege and Nikola Sellmair (translated by Carolin Sommer)
This is the extraordinary and moving memoir of a woman who learns that her grandfather was Amon Goeth, the brutal Nazi commandant depicted in Schindler’s List. When Jennifer Teege, a German-Nigerian woman, happened to pluck a library book from the shelf, she had no idea…
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Island of Bones: Essays
by Joy Castro
What is “identity” when you’re a girl adopted as an infant by a Cuban American family of Jehovah’s Witnesses? The answer isn’t easy. You won’t find it in books. And you certainly won’t find it in the neighborhood. This is just the beginning of Joy…
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The Truth Book: A Memoir
by Joy Castro
Adopted as a baby and raised by a devout Jehovah’s Witness family, Joy Castro is constantly reminded to tell the truth no matter what the consequences. Nevertheless, Castro finds this tenet to be the most violated. Here, in her very own Truth Book, Castro bears…
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Taking Down the Wall
by Christine Murphy
To find a solution, a person must first admit there is a problem. Taking Down the Wall is a chronicle of one woman’s journey to the painful and reluctant admission that there is indeed a problem, her refusal to let an old wound heal. The…
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Mum’s the Word!
by Lorna Little
What happens when you receive a piece of information that changes your life? Mum’s the Word is not just one way to react, but also a 40,000-word memoir that takes you through how the author handled such news. Suspense builds as a story of family…
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Indigo: In Search of the Color That Seduced the World
by Catherine E. McKinley
Brimming with rich, electrifying tales of the precious dye and its ancient heritage, Indigo is also the story of a personal quest: Catherine McKinley is the descendant of a clan of Scots who wore indigo tartan; Jewish “rag traders”; a Massachusetts textile factory owner; and…
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The Book of Sarahs: A Family in Parts
by Catherine E. McKinley
Catherine McKinley was one of only a few thousand African American and bi-racial children adopted by white couples in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Raised in a small, white New England town, she had a persistent longing for the more diverse community that would…
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Remedies
by Patricia Cotter-Busbee
Remedies is a deeply original autobiographical fiction that chronicles the lives of five generations of women. It is beautifully layered and brought to life through image-driven vignettes that have been paired down into razor-sharp scenes. The stories convey tragedy and comedy in equal portions. Wombs…
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Waving Backwards
by V.L. Brunskill
Imagine not knowing who you are, until you find yourself in a statue 800 miles from home. Join intensely passionate and fiercely independent New York college student Lara Bonavito on an unforgettable journey of self-discovery in sigh-worthy Savannah, Georgia. Adopted into an abusive and impoverished…
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After the Morning Calm: Reflections of Korean Adoptees
Edited by Sook Wilkinson, PhD, and Nancy Fox
Korean adult adoptees speak out in this anthology. Through memories, reflections, and poetry, adoptees speak to the range of issues that accompany adoption: feelings of belonging and difference, self and other, culture and accomodation, love and loss. We now know that it is in late…
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The Syrian Jewelry Box: A Daughter’s Journey for Truth
by Carina Sue Burns
Carina Rourke is a young American growing up in blissful innocence in the Middle East until at age fifteen she is captivated by an obsessive desire to search inside of her mother’s forbidden jewelry box. Carina discovers a shocking family secret. On the heels of her discovery,…
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What Do You Mean I Was Adopted? 7 Steps to Acceptance, Gratitude & Peace
by Carina S. Burns
Were you adopted? Did you have a similar experience? Do you face issues with identity? Ms. Burns learned of her own adoption when she was a teenager growing up in the Middle East, and it came as a shock. Rather than a prescribed formula for…
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A Legitimate Life: A Forbidden Journey of Self-Discovery
by Melinda A. Warshaw
Adopted into an affluent and aristocratic family, Melinda A. Warshaw had everything a little girl could want—the best clothes, the best toys, horse riding lessons, anything else her heart desired. But what she didn’t have was answers. Why was she so different from the people…
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Songs of My Families: A Thirty-Seven-Year Odyssey from Korea to America and Back
by Kelly Fern with Brad Fern
In 1971, Lee Myonghi, aged five, was taken from her family and placed in a Korean orphanage. Six months later, she was flown to the United States, where she and two other Korean girls were adopted by a Minnesota couple. They renamed her Kelly Jean.…
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Searching for the Castle: Backtrail of an Adoption
by Barbara Leigh Ohrstrom
Like cowboys turning in the saddle to look at where they came from, Searching for the Castle documents the backtrail of author Barbara Leigh Ohrstrom’s adoption. It begins with her urgency as an eighteen-year-old woman initiating her search for her birth parents. Her recollection includes…
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Parenting As Adoptees
Edited by Adam Chau and Kevin Ost-Vollmers
Through fourteen chapters, the authors of Parenting As Adoptees give readers a glimpse into a pivotal phase in life that touches the experiences of many domestic and international adoptees–that of parenting. The authors, who are all adoptees from various walks of life, intertwine their personal…
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Bastards: A Memoir
by Mary Anna King
In the early 1980s, Mary Hall is a little girl growing up in poverty in Camden, New Jersey, with her older brother Jacob and parents who, in her words, were “great at making babies, but not so great at holding on to them.” After her…
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The English American: A Novel
by Alison Larkin
When Pippa Dunn,adopted as an infant and raised terribly British, discovers that her birth parents are from the American South, she finds that “culture clash” has layers of meaning she’d never imagined. Meet The English American, a fabulously funny, deeply poignant debut novel that sprang…
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The Fifth and Final Name: Memoir of an American Churchill
by Rhonda Noonan
In a family memoir that reads like a detective novel, Rhonda Noonan recounts her thirty-year quest to find the truth of her own background–and what she uncovered will surprise readers as much as it did her. Rhonda was born and adopted in Oklahoma, a state…
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She Named You Donna
by Julie Kerton
It’s a January morning in 1976; Julie rips the hospital bracelet from her wrist and throws it across the room. As it lands, she doesn’t know that the sound will echo through the years. But the story doesn’t begin here. In a suburb north of…
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If I Should Die Before I Wake
By Eileen Munro
In her memoir As I Lay Me Down to Sleep, Eileen Munro vividly documented the abuse she experienced at the hands of her adoptive parents and, later, within the care system. The birth of her son, Craig, and her escape from the authorities’ clutches should have…
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As I Lay Me Down to Sleep
by Eileen Munro with Carol McKay
The harrowing true story of how one woman was betrayed by everyone who was supposed to care for her. When Eileen Munro’s mother became pregnant at 17, she was told to give her baby away to a “good family,” but the couple who paid the…
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Ghost of Sangju: A Memoir of Reconciliation
by Soojung Jo
Ghost of Sangju takes readers through Soojung’s childhood in Kentucky filled with joy, family, friendship—and the loneliness of being marked as an outsider even in her own home. Alternating between humor and heartbreak, she offers a glimpse into a life foreign to most: that of…
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Ballerina Dreams: From Orphan to Dancer (Step Into Reading, Step 4)
by Michaela DePrince and Elaine DePrince
At the age of three, Michaela DePrince found a photo of a ballerina that changed her life. She was living in an orphanage in Sierra Leone at the time, but was soon adopted by a family and brought to America. Michaela never forgot the photo…