Adoptee Reading is a catalog of books, all of which meet one of the following criteria:
- a book written by an adoptee
- an adoption-themed book not written by an adoptee that is recommended by an adoptee
The books listed here are categorized in multiple ways:
- by subject (adoptees, adoptive families, birth families, search/reunion, LGBT, etc.)
- by type of adoption (domestic, transracial, intercountry, etc.)
- by genre (memoir, fiction, psychology, poetry, etc.)
- by author
A book is listed in all the categories that apply to it, therefore you may discover the same book via different menu options. For example, if a book is a memoir in verse about a lesbian Korean adoptee meeting her birth mother for the first time, it will be listed on all of the following pages:
- Adoptees
- Female Adoptees
- Search/Reunion
- LGBT
- Intercountry
- Korea
- Memoir/Biography
- Poetry
- Adoptee Authors
When accessing book lists featured on the home page, books are usually listed in reverse chronological order by the date they were added to the site. You can get the same list sorted alphabetically by title by accessing it via the menu. The exception to this are the author listings–when you click on an author’s name, that author’s books may come up in random order, so be sure to browse the entire list.
You can search all our book listings for specific keywords using the search box located beside the menu.
For each book, a brief summary is given, along with editors’s and authors’ names, year of publication, and links to reviews when they can be found. We distinguish between reviews written by adoptees vs. all other reviews, because we feel adoptees are the best people to evaluate adoption books other adoptees may want to read.
Each listing also contains links to sources such as Amazon and IndieBound where the book can be purchased. And if you do click on one of those links and then buy the book, Adoptee Reading will receive a tiny percentage of the sale, which helps offset the cost of hosting and maintaining the site. So, thank you!
We accept book suggestions! If you know of a great book that should be listed here, please submit the suggestion form. (Note that the site editors make the final determination as to whether or not a suggested book is added.)
We are also interested to receive overall feedback about the site, links to book reviews written by adoptees, ideas on how to make the site more useful, etc. Please send those to us using the contact form.
A note about anthologies: Every anthology listed on this site is included because it is an adoption-themed book and at least one of the contributors is an adoptee author. While an anthology editor is included on the listing for an anthology, he/she is not included in the author listings unless he/she is an adoptee who also wrote a piece included in the anthology. Also, non-adoptee authors who contributed to the anthology are not listed separately on this site. These are site limitations we hope to address in the future.