Author: Editor
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Billie’s Kid: A True Story About Adoption
by Steve Tucker
Jazz musician Steve Tucker has always known he was adopted and has spent nearly fifty years tormented by thoughts of who he is, where he came from, and whom he looks like. Like many adoptees, he embarks on a journey of discovery when he goes…
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Marilyn
by Amanda Ngoho Reavey
Amanda [Ngoho] Reavey’s first book, Marilyn, began as an exploration through somatic experiments on what it means to stay and became a fragmented map of the immigration system, the international adoption process, and family. How do you articulate disenfranchised grief? How does a person who…
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Restored: Pursuing Wholeness When a Relationship Is Broken
by Deanna Doss Shrodes
Have your hopes been dashed into pieces when you tried to make a relationship work and the other person didn’t respond as you wished? Have you asked someone to forgive you, but he or she didn’t respond as you desired? Have you prayed for healing…
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The Mouse Room
by Susan Ito
Susan Ito is a struggling college student, a young adult on the cusp of parental independence, when she meets her birth mother for the first time. Instead of launching into adulthood, she finds herself entangled in longing for this new kind of mother love where…
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Silent Voices
by Carlynne Hershberger
The story of adoption is seldom told from the natural mother’s point of view. Eleven full color paintings with narrative poetry tell a story of loss, longing, power, powerlessness, surrender, grief, family and meaning. It represents the spiritual and physical connection that women have with…
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Saving Grace: A Story of Adoption
by L.B. Johnson
It started with a piece of paper–a birth certificate, sent to the author’s parents long after her birth. There is much history in that piece of paper. For she was born to an unwed mother in the generation prior to Roe v. Wade, on a…
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A Family Apart: Sleuthing the Mysteries of Abandonment, Adoption and DNA
by Craig A. Steffen
A Family Apart: Sleuthing the Mysteries of Abandonment, Adoption and DNA is a fascinating ride into the methodical quest of an orphan to uncover the truth about his origins. Even more, this book delves into the questions that come from being uncertain about the realities…
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Everything You Ever Wanted: A Memoir
by Jillian Lauren
In her younger years, Jillian Lauren was a college dropout, a drug addict, and an international concubine in the Prince of Brunei’s harem, an experience she immortalized in in her bestselling memoir, Some Girls. In her thirties, Jillian’s most radical act was learning the steadying power of…
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Scoop Baby: . . . It Is Time
by H.T. Sawyer
They said her baby died… Baby Scoop Era: Once upon a time, unwed mothers were trained to care for their babies, largely by Christian women. In the 1940’s, however, maternity wards began to gain favor, as did the idea of relinquishing babies to well-meaning strangers.…
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Pretty: A Novel
by Jillian Lauren
Bebe Baker is an ex-everything: ex-stripper, ex-Christian, ex-drug addict, ex-pretty girl. It’s been one year since the car accident that killed her boyfriend left her scarred and shaken. Flanked by an eccentric posse of friends, she is serving out a self-imposed sentence at a halfway…
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Some Girls: My Life in a Harem
by Jillian Lauren
At eighteen, Jillian Lauren was an NYU theater school dropout with a tip about an upcoming audition. The “casting director” told her that a rich businessman in Singapore would pay pretty American girls $20,000 if they stayed for two weeks to spice up his parties.…
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Transformatrix
by Patience Agbabi
“They call me Jax, though my real name’s Eva / The whole of the Jackson Five rolled into one serious diva / No.1 on the guest list, top of the charts / When I make my grand entrance, the sea of sequins parts…” From Hamburg to…
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R.A.W.
by Patience Agbabi
First poetry collection by UK poet Patience Agbabi. Portions of the collection are reportedly autobiographical. Adoptee Author: Patience Agbabi Publication Year: 1995 Critical Reviews Adoptee Reviews: Other Reviews: All Bookshop and Amazon links on this site are affiliate links. We earn a small commission to help keep…
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Bloodshot Monochrome
by Patience Agbabi
A glorious poetic take on all things black, white, and read. Reinventing the sonnet, Patience Agbabi shines her euphoric, musical lines on everything from growing up to growing old, from Northern Soul to contract killers, from the retro to the brand new. Whether resurrecting the dead…
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Telling Tales
by Patience Agbabi
In Telling Tales, award-winning poet Patience Agbabi presents an inspired 21st-century remix of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, retelling all of the stories, from the Miller’s Tale to the Wife of Bath’s, in her own critically acclaimed poetic style. Celebrating Chaucer’s Middle-English masterwork for its performance element…
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I Knew You by Name: The Search for My Lost Mother
by Peggy Barnes
Peggy Barnes’ recently unsealed birth certificate arrived just after she buried the woman who raised her. She discovered her entire life had been a lie. She was born at The Salvation Army Home for Unwed Mothers to a young woman from the back hills of…
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Surviving Secrets
by Margaret Watson
A true story that reveals the strength and resilience of the human spirit in the face of betrayal, grief and loss. At age forty, Margaret Watson learned she was adopted. This shocking and confronting truth was previously unknown to her and turned her whole world…
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In Their Voices: Black Americans on Transracial Adoption
by Rhonda M. Roorda
While many proponents of transracial adoption claim that American society is increasingly becoming “color-blind,” a growing body of research reveals that for transracial adoptees of all backgrounds, racial identity does matter. Rhonda M. Roorda elaborates significantly on that finding, specifically studying the effects of the…
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I Wish for You a Beautiful Life: Letters from the Korean Birth Mothers of Ae Ran Won to Their Children
Edited by Sara Dorow
A collection of anonymous letters written by Korean birth mothers to the children they relinquished for adoption. The mothers were helped by the Ae Ran Won agency in Seoul, Korea, which provides a temporary home to unmarried pregnant women before and after they give birth.…
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When You Were Born in China: A Memory Book for Children Adopted from China
by Sara Dorow
This book utilizes photographs to educate about life in China and includes information about Chinese social policies, orphanages, and the journey of an adopted child to the United States. Author: Sara Dorow Publication Year: 1997 Critical Reviews Adoptee Reviews: Other Reviews: All Bookshop and Amazon links on…
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Star of the Week: A Story of Love, Adoption, and Brownies with Sprinkles
by Darlene Friedman
It’s Cassidy-Li’s turn to be Star of the Week at school! So she’s making brownies and collecting photos for her poster. She has pictures of all the important people in her life—with one big exception. Cassidy-Li, adopted from China when she was a baby, doesn’t…
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Kids Like Me in China
by Ying Ying Fry (with Amy Klatzkin)
In this first view of China adoption from a child’s perspective, eight-year-old Ying Ying Fry returns to her orphanage to remember what it is like and to write a story so that other adopted children will understand where they came from. Kids Like Me in…
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Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love
by Xinran (translated from Chinese by Nicky Harman)
Following her internationally bestselling book The Good Women of China, Xinran has written one of the most powerful accounts of the lives of Chinese women. She has gained entrance to the most pained, secret chambers in the hearts of Chinese mothers—students, successful businesswomen, midwives, peasants—who,…
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Back to My Roots: My Journey to China
by Yanina Verplanke
“Happy Life is starting from this moment” This slogan is written on the wall of the Chinese adoption bureau of Chongqing. It is quite applicable to the seventeen-month-old toddler De Xing Fu. She grows up as a happy-go-lucky kid in Goes, a town in Zeeland, under…
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How to Greet the Mother Who Bore You (A Short Story)
by Matthew Salesses
Before Teddy and his parents moved to Korea, the adopted nine-year-old knew almost nothing about his birth mother. But once they arrive in Seoul, the boy begins to scan the face of every passing woman, wondering if she might be the one who gave him…
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How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm: And Other Adventures in Parenting (from Argentina to Tanzania and everywhere in between)
by Mei-Ling Hopgood
Mei-Ling Hopgood, a first-time mom from suburban Michigan―now living in Buenos Aires―was shocked that Argentine parents allow their children to stay up until all hours of the night. Could there really be social and developmental advantages to this custom? Driven by a journalist’s curiosity and…
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Lucky Girl
by Mei-Ling Hopgood
In a true story of family ties, journalist Mei-Ling Hopgood, one of the first wave of Asian adoptees to arrive in America, comes face to face with her past when her Chinese birth family suddenly requests a reunion after more than two decades. In 1974,…
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Red Dust Road
by Jackie Kay
From the moment when, as a little girl, she realizes that her skin is a different colour from that of her beloved mum and dad, to the tracing and finding of her birth parents, her Highland mother and Nigerian father, Jackie Kay’s journey in Red…
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The Adoption Papers
by Jackie Kay
Jackie Kay tells the story of a black girl’s adoption by a white Scottish couple- from three different viewpoints: the mother, the birth mother, and the daughter. Adoptee Author: Jackie Kay Publication Year: 1991 Critical Reviews Adoptee Reviews: Other Reviews: All Bookshop and Amazon links on this…
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Romania For Export Only: The Untold Story Of The Romanian Orphans
by Roelie Post
The untold story of the Romanian ‘orphans’ gives an insider’s look into the adoption kitchen, where the most used ingredients are political pressure and emotional blackmail. A nexus of adoption agencies, adoptive parents and politicians are using their powers to ensure that intercountry adoptions continue.…