Including More Than 450 Adoptee-Recommended Titles!

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.


  • Into the Light
    Into the Light
  • Road to Belonging: Establishing a Legacy of Love After Closed Adoption
    Road to Belonging: Establishing a Legacy of Love After Closed Adoption
  • Finding Loretta: An Adopted Daughter’s Search to Define Family
    Finding Loretta: An Adopted Daughter’s Search to Define Family

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  • Adoption and Suicidality: An Anthology of Stories, Poems, and Resources for Adoptees, Families, Healthcare Professionals, and Allies

    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

  • Almost Loved: Poems

    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


  • Road to Belonging: Establishing a Legacy of Love After Closed Adoption

    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

  • Finding Loretta: An Adopted Daughter’s Search to Define Family

    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


  • The Sense of Wonder

    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

  • Jules Fae: A Story of Adoption and Reunion

    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


  • 45 Days of Pushing Through: A Guided Journal

    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

  • Let Us Be Greater: A Gentle, Guided Path to Healing for Adoptees

    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

  • Adult Adoptees and Writing to Heal: Migrating Toward Wholeness

    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


  • Adoption’s Hidden History: Steps to Sealing the Records (Vol. 2)

    Adoption’s Hidden History: Steps to Sealing the Records (Vol. 2)

    An estimated six million Americans are adopted. The development of laws and regulations facilitating this process has been shrouded in mystery. “Adoption’s Hidden History” is for anyone who has ever been touched by adoption. From Myra Clark Gaines’ nineteenth century court fight for recognition as… Read more

  • Adoption’s Hidden History: From Native American Tribes to Locked Lives (Vol. 1)

    Adoption’s Hidden History: From Native American Tribes to Locked Lives (Vol. 1)

    Adoptions are finalized daily across America. Like the root system of a giant oak, tentacles of its history are submerged in years of human experience. Native Americans adopted children and adults into their tribes before pilgrims settled in the New World. Early-day adoption advocates took… Read more

  • Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid pro quo?

    Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid pro quo?

    This book presents a committed quest to unravel and document the postwar adoption networks that placed more than 3,000 Greek children in the United States, in a movement accelerated by the aftermath of the Greek Civil War and by the new conditions of the global… Read more


  • Adoption and Suicidality: An Anthology of Stories, Poems, and Resources for Adoptees, Families, Healthcare Professionals, and Allies

    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

  • When We Become Ours: A YA Adoptee Anthology

    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


  • Almost Loved: Poems

    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

  • In Praise of Late Wonder

    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


  • Into the Light

    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

  • When We Become Ours: A YA Adoptee Anthology

    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