Including More Than 450 Adoptee-Recommended Titles!

Author: Editor

  • Unbearable Splendor

    Unbearable Splendor

    by Sun Yung Shin

    Finalist for the Believer Poetry Award Sun Yung Shin moves ideas—of identity (Korean, American, adoptee, mother, Catholic, Buddhist) and interest (mythology, science fiction, Sophocles)— around like building blocks, forming and reforming new constructions of what it means to be at home. Adoptee Author: Sun Yung Shin…

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  • Ten Ways Not To Commit Suicide: A Memoir

    Ten Ways Not To Commit Suicide: A Memoir

    by Darryl McDaniels with Darrell Dawsey

    As one third of the legendary rap group Run D.M.C., Darryl “DMC” McDaniels—aka Legendary MC, The Devastating Mic Controller, and the King of Rock—had it all: talent, money, fame, prestige. While hitting #1 on the Billboard charts was exhilarating, the group’s success soon became overwhelming.…

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  • Heartlines: The Year I Met My Other Mother

    Heartlines: The Year I Met My Other Mother

    by Susannah McFarlane and Robin Leuba

    In 1965, Robin, unmarried and pregnant, comes to Melbourne to give birth and give her baby up for adoption, then returns to Perth to resume her life having never seen her baby. After 10 days alone, the baby is taken home, named Susannah, and made…

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  • A Girl Named Connie

    A Girl Named Connie

    by Carol Perkins with Connie Wilson

    In 1946, being adopted was a social curse and a lifelong sentence. I was born that year, but not to prosperous business owners, Bill and Cloteel Wilson as I had thought. When I was six weeks old, they brought me to their rural Kentucky town,…

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  • Adoption Deception: A Personal and Professional Journey

    Adoption Deception: A Personal and Professional Journey

    by Penny Mackieson

    Have you ever wondered how it might feel to have been adopted in Australia during the pre-1980s era in which vulnerable young mothers were coerced into relinquishing their babies? How it might feel to have grown up, become a social worker and worked with vulnerable…

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  • Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism

    Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism

    by Kim Park Nelson

    The first Korean adoptees were powerful symbols of American superiority in the Cold War; as Korean adoption continued, adoptees’ visibility as Asians faded as they became a geopolitical success story—all-American children in loving white families. In Invisible Asians, Kim Park Nelson analyzes the processes by…

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  • Unwanted Truths

    Unwanted Truths

    by Tricia Haddon

    Family secrets – we all have them. But some are more devastating than others…Jenny Porter knows the name of every capital city in the world, but that doesn’t mean she has all the answers. When she discovers she is adopted, she has nobody to turn…

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  • My Secret

    My Secret

    by Joanne E. Sayre

    What if you found out that you were adopted and everything you thought you knew about your family, your security, was shattered? My Secret is about my 40 year quest for truth about who I am. But, more than that, this story is about overcoming…

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  • The Adoption Reunion Survival Guide: Preparing Yourself for the Search, Reunion, and Beyond

    The Adoption Reunion Survival Guide: Preparing Yourself for the Search, Reunion, and Beyond

    by Julie Jarrell Bailey and Lynn N. Giddens, M.A.

    This book is written by two adoption specialists, one of whom is a reunited birthmother, and draws on the real-life experiences of others to help readers prepare for the emotional turbulence of the reunion experience, examine their fantasies and emotions about it, and find a…

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  • Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption

    Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption

    by E. Wayne Carp

    Adoption is a hot topic–played out in the news and on TV talk shows, in advice columns and tell-all tales–but for the 25 million Americans who are members of the adoption triad of adoptees, adoptive parents, and birth parents, the true story of adoption has…

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  • Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America

    Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America

    by Catherine Ceniza Choy

    In the last fifty years, transnational adoption—specifically, the adoption of Asian children—has exploded in popularity as an alternative path to family making. Despite the cultural acceptance of this practice, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the factors that allowed Asian international adoption to flourish.…

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  • Strangers and Kin: The American Way of Adoption

    Strangers and Kin: The American Way of Adoption

    by Barbara Melosh

    Strangers and Kin is the history of adoption, a quintessentially American institution in its buoyant optimism, generous spirit, and confidence in social engineering. An adoptive mother herself, Barbara Melosh tells the story of how married couples without children sought to care for and nurture other…

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  • The Translation of Han

    The Translation of Han

    by Hei Kyong Kim

    The Translation of Han is a collection of poetry and prose about the spiritual, psychological, personal and political aspects of historical and intergenerational trauma amongst a people; it explores issues of race, adoption, culture, gender, lateral oppression, violence, love, family, and grief and loss. It…

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  • An Australian Son

    An Australian Son

    by Gordon Matthews

    Autobiography of Gordon Matthews. Adopted at birth, he grew up in the 1950s in middle class Kew. Through a series of circumstances Matthews came to believe he was of Aboriginal descent. Passionately, he formally embraced this identity and acquired a profile in the diplomatic service.…

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  • Adopted Out: A Memoir of Closed Adoption and Blackness

    Adopted Out: A Memoir of Closed Adoption and Blackness

    by S.M. Ezeff

    While searching for her birth family, S.M. Ezeff discovered there was a shortage of African American adoptees speaking out and came to realize that agency-based adoption is still taboo within the African American community. Constantly being asked if her adoptive parents were Black, she learned…

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  • The Mysteries of Eva Miller Revealed

    The Mysteries of Eva Miller Revealed

    by Eva D. Miller

    Former American Idol contestant Eva Miller takes you on an inspiring journey of both tragedy and triumph. Through her courage and faith Eva set out on a mission to unravel the mysteries that shrouded her life, she never knew what could possibly await her. Join…

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  • An Affair with My Mother: A Story of Adoption, Secrecy and Love

    An Affair with My Mother: A Story of Adoption, Secrecy and Love

    by Caitríona Palmer

    Caitríona Palmer had a happy childhood in Dublin, raised by loving adoptive parents. But when she was in her late twenties, she realized that she had a strong need to know the woman who had given birth to her. She was able to locate her…

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  • Three More Words

    Three More Words

    by Ashley Rhodes-Courter

    Ashley Rhodes-Courter spent a harrowing nine years of her life in fourteen different foster homes. Her memoir, Three Little Words, captivated audiences everywhere and went on to become a New York Times bestseller. Now Ashley reveals the nuances of life after foster care: College and…

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  • Three Little Words: A Memoir

    Three Little Words: A Memoir

    by Ashley Rhodes-Courter

    An inspiring true story of the tumultuous nine years Ashley Rhodes-Courter spent in the foster care system, and how she triumphed over painful memories and real-life horrors to ultimately find her own voice. “Sunshine, you’re my baby and I’m your only mother. You must mind…

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  • Flip the Script: Adult Adoptee Anthology

    Flip the Script: Adult Adoptee Anthology

    Edited by Diane René Christian, Amanda H.L. Transue-Woolston, and Rosita González

    Flip the Script: Adult Adoptee Anthology is a dynamic artistic exploration of adoptee expression and experience. This anthology offers readers a diverse compilation of literature and artistry from a global community of adoptees. From playwrights to poets, filmmakers to photographers, essay writers to lyricists—all have…

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  • In a Country of Mothers

    In a Country of Mothers

    by A. M. Homes

    No relationship is more charged than that between a psychotherapist and her patient—unless it is the relationship between a mother and her daughter. This disturbing literary thriller explores what happens when the line between those relationships blurs. Jody Goodman enters psychotherapy with questions of career…

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  • Things You Should Know: A Collection of Stories

    Things You Should Know: A Collection of Stories

    by A. M. Homes

    Homes’s distinctive narratives illuminate our dreams and desires, our memories and losses, and our profound need for connection, and demonstrate how extraordinary the ordinary can be. In “Chinese Lesson,” we meet Geordie, a man watching over his wandering, senile mother-in-law by means of an electronic…

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  • Jack

    Jack

    by A. M. Homes

    In Jack, A. M. Homes gives us a teenager who wants nothing more than to be normal—even if being normal means having divorced parents and a rather strange best friend. But when Jack’s father takes him out in a rowboat on Lake Watchmayoyo and tells…

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  • Music for Torching

    Music for Torching

    by A. M. Homes

    As A.M. Homes’s incendiary novel unfolds, the Kodacolor hues of the good life become nearly hallucinogenic. Laying bare the foundations of a marriage, flash frozen in the anxious entropy of a suburban subdivision, Paul and Elaine spin the quit terrors of family life into a…

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  • The Safety of Objects: Stories

    The Safety of Objects: Stories

    by A. M. Homes

    Originally published in 1990 to wide critical acclaim, this extraordinary first collection of stories by A. M. Homes confronts the real and the surreal on even terms to create a disturbing and sometimes hilarious vision of the American dream. Included here are “Adults Alone,” in…

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  • The End of Alice

    The End of Alice

    by A. M. Homes

    Here is the incredible story of an imprisoned pedophile who is drawn into an erotically charged correspondence with a nineteen-year-old suburban coed. As the two reveal–and revel in–their obsessive desires, Homes creates in The End of Alice a novel that is part romance, part horror…

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  • This Book Will Save Your Life

    This Book Will Save Your Life

    by A. M. Homes

    Richard Novak is a modern-day Everyman, a middle-aged divorcé trading stocks out of his home. He has done such a good job getting his life under control that he needs no one—except his trainer, nutritionist, and housekeeper. He is functionally dead and doesn’t even notice…

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  • May We Be Forgiven

    May We Be Forgiven

    by A. M. Homes

    In this vivid, transfixing new novel, A. M. Homes presents a darkly comic look at twenty-first-century domestic life and the possibility of personal transformation. Harold Silver has spent a lifetime watching his more successful younger brother, George, acquire a covetable wife, two kids, and a…

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  • The Mistress’s Daughter

    The Mistress’s Daughter

    by A. M. Homes

    The acclaimed writer A. M. Homes was given up for adoption before she was born. Her biological mother was a twenty-two-year-old single woman who was having an affair with a much older married man with a family of his own. The Mistress’s Daughter is the…

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  • Journeys After Adoption: Understanding Lifelong Issues

    Journeys After Adoption: Understanding Lifelong Issues

    by Jayne E. Schooler and Betsie L. Norris

    What can we learn about the experience of adoption from those who have taken that journey? How can those touched by adoption navigate successfully through the issues of search, reunion, and aftermath? Will those answers have a positive impact on adoption today? Drawing upon the…

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