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.

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  • 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

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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

  • 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


  • Woman of Interest: A Memoir

    Woman of Interest: A Memoir

    In 2020, Tracy O’Neill began to rethink her ideas of comfort and safety. Just out of a ten-year relationship and thirtysomething, she was driven by an acute awareness that the… Read more

  • Pulled by the Root: An Adoptee’s Healing Journey From Trauma, Shame, and Loss

    Pulled by the Root: An Adoptee’s Healing Journey From Trauma, Shame, and Loss

    Adoption involves complex trauma that, if unhealed and unheard, will pulse through subsequent generations. Pulled by the Root is a raw, vivid, and cinematic account of Heidi Marble’s lived experience… Read more


  • Sanctuaries

    Sanctuaries

    Gianni, a gay adoptee, comes of age in a time when adoption and same-sex love are not easily discussed or accepted. Sanctuaries is a tender story of love and healing, set… Read more

  • Seoulmates

    Seoulmates

    When Hara Wilson lands in Seoul to find her birth mother, she doesn’t plan on falling in love with the first man she lays eyes on, but Choi Yujun is… 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


  • 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


  • 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


  • 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


  • 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