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.

RECENTLY ADDED

  • What They Never Told Us: True Stories of Family Secrets and Hidden Identities Revealed
    What They Never Told Us: True Stories of Family Secrets and Hidden Identities Revealed
  • The Violence of Love: Race, Family, and Adoption in the United States
    The Violence of Love: Race, Family, and Adoption in the United States
  • Woman of Interest: A Memoir
    Woman of Interest: A Memoir
Visit the Adoptee Reading store on Bookshop.org!

Your purchase helps support Adoptee Reading as well as independent bookstores

SHOP NOW

NEWLY PUBLISHED

  • 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

  • Connecting Threads: Five Siblings Lost and Found

    Connecting Threads: Five Siblings Lost and Found

    A graphic memoir about siblings of Indigenous and European-American heritage who are taken from their first family, placed in foster care, and most were adopted-a story of the journey to… Read more

RECENT MEMOIRS

  • Practically Still a Virgin: An Adoption Memoir

    Practically Still a Virgin: An Adoption Memoir

    During Alaska’s rough-and-tumble 1970s oil boom, a time when prostitution, violence, and lawlessness reigned, Monica Hall rebels against her strict Catholic parents in a downward spiral of delinquency. Overwhelmed by… Read more

  • Who Is a Worthy Mother?: An Intimate History of Adoption

    Who Is a Worthy Mother?: An Intimate History of Adoption

    Nearly every person in the United States is affected by adoption. Adoption practices are woven into the fabric of American society and reflect how our nation values human beings, particularly… Read more

RECENT FICTION

  • Sacrificial Animals: A Novel

    Sacrificial Animals: A Novel

    Inspired by Kailee Pedersen’s own journey being adopted from Nanning, China in 1996 and growing up alongside her family’s farm in Nebraska, this rich and atmospheric supernatural horror debut explores… Read more

  • When the Ocean Flies

    When the Ocean Flies

    An email from a stranger tells Alison Earley that her natural father, whom she has known for only six years, has died suddenly. What begins as a short trip back… Read more

RECENT PSYCHOLOGY/SELF-HELP

  • A Fire Is Coming

    A Fire Is Coming

    The true story of when Emma Stevens learned her new next-door neighbor was a psychologist, she innocently asked about how to find a therapist for her own issues. Dr. Carol Brenner decided to accept her as a patient. Against a backdrop of the Laguna Beach… Read more

  • Coloring & Journal Book For Adoptees With Motivational Quotes: For Adoptees Healing Journey – Volume 1

    Coloring & Journal Book For Adoptees With Motivational Quotes: For Adoptees Healing Journey – Volume 1

    As an adult adoptee that struggles with the seven core issues of being adopted, (loss, rejection, guilt and shame, grief, identity, intimacy, and mastery/control), I have created this therapeutic coloring book with motivational uplifting quotes and affirmations, original illustrations and patterns, and journaling pages to… Read more

  • Swear, Vent & Coloring Book For (very) F*cking Angry Adoptees: For Adoptees Healing Journey – Volume 1

    Swear, Vent & Coloring Book For (very) F*cking Angry Adoptees: For Adoptees Healing Journey – Volume 1

    Why an angry sweary coloring and journal book? Because punching people in the face is frowned upon, and anger isn’t great for your overall mental and physical health if you hold on to it–so just let it all out! As an adult adoptee that struggles… Read more

RECENT JOURNALISM & RESEARCH

  • What They Never Told Us: True Stories of Family Secrets and Hidden Identities Revealed

    What They Never Told Us: True Stories of Family Secrets and Hidden Identities Revealed

    What They Never Told Us tells the stories of ordinary people who made extraordinary, life-changing discoveries about their parentage and/or race and ethnicity that fractured their identities. The book asks the big questions: Who are we? And what is family? Blending social history and personal narratives,… Read more

  • The Violence of Love: Race, Family, and Adoption in the United States

    The Violence of Love: Race, Family, and Adoption in the United States

    The Violence of Love challenges the narrative that adoption is a solely loving act that benefits birth parents, adopted individuals, and adoptive parents–a narrative that is especially pervasive with transracial and transnational adoptions. Using interdisciplinary methods of archival, legal, and discursive analysis, Kit W. Myers comparatively… Read more

  • The Price of Children: Stolen Lives in a Land Without Choice

    The Price of Children: Stolen Lives in a Land Without Choice

    A powerful church. An acquiescent government. In The Price of Children, investigative journalist Maria Laurino details the shocking story of mothers and children deceived and exploited as directed by the highest levels of the Vatican. Between 1950 and 1970, the Vatican and the American Catholic Church… Read more

RECENT ANTHOLOGIES

  • Lions Roaring Far From Home: An Anthology by Ethiopian Adoptees

    Lions Roaring Far From Home: An Anthology by Ethiopian Adoptees

    Lions Roaring Far From Home: An Anthology by Ethiopian Adoptees includes the essays and poems of 33 writers, ages 8 to over 50, raised in six countries (the US, Canada, Sweden,… Read more

  • Dear Me….: Letters to Our Younger Adoptee Selves

    Dear Me….: Letters to Our Younger Adoptee Selves

    This is a book of words and pictures. The images are important because they reflect the people we are now and the children we were growing up. We can see… Read more

RECENT POETRY

  • 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

  • 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

RECENT CHILDREN/TEENS

  • The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be: A Speculative Memoir of Transracial Adoption

    The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be: A Speculative Memoir of Transracial Adoption

    Part memoir, part speculative fiction, this novel explores the often surreal experience of growing up as a mixed-Black transracial adoptee. Dream Country author Shannon Gibney returns with a new book woven… Read more

  • Everyone Hates Kelsie Miller

    Everyone Hates Kelsie Miller

    There’s no one Kelsie Miller hates more than Eric Mulvaney Ortiz—the homecoming king, captain of the football team, and academic archrival in her hyper-competitive prep school. But after Kelsie’s best… Read more