RECENTLY ADDED
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Into the Light
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Road to Belonging: Establishing a Legacy of Love After Closed Adoption
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Finding Loretta: An Adopted Daughter’s Search to Define Family
Including More Than 450 Adoptee-Recommended Titles!
Welcome!
Adoptee Reading is a catalog of books written by adoptees along with other adoption-related books recommended by adoptees.
If you’re new to this site, begin with the Overview and How To Use This Site.
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NEWLY PUBLISHED
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Adoption and Suicidality: An Anthology of Stories, Poems, and Resources for Adoptees, Families, Healthcare Professionals, and Allies
This book is a wake-up call to those impacted by adoption and to those who interact with them. According to preliminary results of a groundbreaking study out of Winston-Salem State… Read more
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Almost Loved: Poems
“What if you spend the rest of your life chasing love, only to find her cowering in the pit of your stomach? What then?” Almost Loved follows a former foster child’s… Read more
RECENT MEMOIRS
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Road to Belonging: Establishing a Legacy of Love After Closed Adoption
Each person has their own unique story, and as Lynne Leppard’s early life included foster care and adoption, she often found herself wondering about her origins and heritage. Her loyalty… Read more
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Finding Loretta: An Adopted Daughter’s Search to Define Family
Adopted as an infant by a naval officer and his wife during the Baby Scoop Era, Diane Wheaton has always heard conflicting versions of the truth of her origins—but it’s… Read more
RECENT FICTION
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The Sense of Wonder
An Asian American basketball star walks into a gym. No one recognizes him, but everyone stares anyway. It is the start of a joke but what is the punchline? When… Read more
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Jules Fae: A Story of Adoption and Reunion
First mother, teenage Claire Jordan, enters college in 1965. Intending to be Nebraska’s Ideal Coed, she discovers she’s pregnant just weeks into her freshman year. Expelled from school and disowned… Read more
RECENT PSYCHOLOGY/SELF-HELP
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45 Days of Pushing Through: A Guided Journal
Are you ready for a change? Like really ready? Have you battled low self-esteem, poor internal dialogue, remnants of a traumatic childhood, abusive relationship, or simply feeling a bit… lost? You have the key to unlocking a better you… right inside yourself. In your heart, your mind,… Read more
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Let Us Be Greater: A Gentle, Guided Path to Healing for Adoptees
Adoption is a lifeline of support and opportunity for countless people, but it can bring challenges and emotional conditions that are often silenced or left unaddressed, including PTSD, risk of suicide, and fear of abandonment. Author Michelle Madrid has experienced these challenges as a foster… Read more
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Adult Adoptees and Writing to Heal: Migrating Toward Wholeness
We live in a world where conversations about trauma are becoming commonplace and adopted people are using their voices to educate the general public about the effects of maternal separation and genealogical bewilderment. But for many adult adoptees the act of speaking truth to power… Read more
RECENT JOURNALISM & RESEARCH
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In Reunion: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Communication of Family
“Do you know your real parents?” is a question many adoptees are asked. In In Reunion, Sara Docan-Morgan probes the basic notions of family, adoption, and parenthood by exploring initial meetings and ongoing relationships that transnational Korean adoptees have had with their birth parents and other… Read more
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Adoption Unfiltered: Revelations from Adoptees, Birth Parents, Adoptive Parents, and Allies
Adoption Unfiltered authors Sara Easterly (adoptee), Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard (birth parent), and Lori Holden (adoptive parent) interview dozens of adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, social workers, therapists, and other allies–all sharing candidly about the challenges in adoption. While finding common ground in the sometimes-contentious… Read more
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Adoption Fantasies: The Fetishization of Asian Adoptees from Girlhood to Womanhood
In Adoption Fantasies, Kimberly D. McKee explores the ways adopted Asian women and girls are situated at a nexus of objectifications—as adoptees and as Asian American women—and how they negotiate competing expectations based on sensationalist and fictional portrayals of adoption found in US popular culture. McKee… Read more
RECENT ANTHOLOGIES
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Adoption and Suicidality: An Anthology of Stories, Poems, and Resources for Adoptees, Families, Healthcare Professionals, and Allies
This book is a wake-up call to those impacted by adoption and to those who interact with them. According to preliminary results of a groundbreaking study out of Winston-Salem State… Read more
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When We Become Ours: A YA Adoptee Anthology
There is no universal adoption experience, and no two adoptees have the same story. This anthology for teens edited by Shannon Gibney and Nicole Chung contains a wide range of… Read more
RECENT POETRY
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Almost Loved: Poems
“What if you spend the rest of your life chasing love, only to find her cowering in the pit of your stomach? What then?” Almost Loved follows a former foster child’s… Read more
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In Praise of Late Wonder
In his most personal collection of poems to date, California Poet Laureate Lee Herrick writes with openness about his adoption from Korea in more than 25 new memoir-like prose poems.… Read more
RECENT CHILDREN/TEENS
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Into the Light
When you’re like me, you have to lie.It’s been one year since Manny was cast out of his family and driven into the wilderness of the American Southwest. Since then,… Read more
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When We Become Ours: A YA Adoptee Anthology
There is no universal adoption experience, and no two adoptees have the same story. This anthology for teens edited by Shannon Gibney and Nicole Chung contains a wide range of… Read more