Including More Than 450 Adoptee-Recommended Titles!

Author: Editor

  • Await Your Reply

    Await Your Reply

    by Dan Chaon

    The lives of three strangers interconnect in unforeseen ways–and with unexpected consequences. Longing to get on with his life, Miles Cheshire nevertheless can’t stop searching for his troubled twin brother, Hayden, who has been missing for ten years. A few days after graduating from high school, Lucy…

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  • Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption

    Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption

    Edited by Jane Jeong Trenka, Julia Chinyere Oparah, and Sun Yung Shin

    Many adoptees are required to become people that they were never meant to be. While transracial adoption tends to be considered benevolent, it often exacts a heavy emotional, cultural, and economic toll on those who directly experience it. Outsiders Within is a landmark publication that carefully…

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  • Adoption Therapy: Perspectives from Clients and Clinicians on Processing and Healing Post-Adoption Issues

    Adoption Therapy: Perspectives from Clients and Clinicians on Processing and Healing Post-Adoption Issues

    Edited by Laura Dennis

    With writing by adoptees, adoptive parents, and clinicians, Adoption Therapy is a first-of-its-kind and wholly unique reference book, providing insight, advice, and personal stories which highlight the specific nature of the adoptee experience. Editor: Laura Dennis Adoptee Authors: Marcy Axness, Ph.D.; Karen Belanger; Karen Caffrey, LPC, JD;…

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  • Adoption Reunion in the Social Media Age

    Adoption Reunion in the Social Media Age

    Edited by Laura Dennis

    This anthology gives voice to the wide experiences of adoptees and those who love them; examining the emotional, psychological and logistical effects of adoption reunion. Primarily adult adoptee voices, we also hear from adoptive parents, first moms and mental health professionals, all weighing in on…

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  • Mother Me: An Adopted Woman’s Journey to Motherhood

    Mother Me: An Adopted Woman’s Journey to Motherhood

    by Zara H. Phillips

    The adopted daughter of loving parents, Zara Phillips nonetheless felt out of place in her family and a misfit in the world around her. Although cherished by a well-meaning mother and father, she grew up feeling deeply insecure and alone, consumed by a void she found…

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  • One Small Sacrifice: A Memoir (Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects)

    One Small Sacrifice: A Memoir (Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects)

    by Trace A. DeMeyer

    Award-winning Native American journalist Trace A. DeMeyer has published her updated memoir One Small Sacrifice: A Memoir (Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects), an exposé on generations of American Indian children adopted by non-Indian families. Known for her exceptional print interviews with famous Native…

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  • Ithaka: A Daughter’s Memoir of Being Found

    Ithaka: A Daughter’s Memoir of Being Found

    by Sarah Saffian

    Adopted as an infant twenty-three years before, living happily in New York, Sarah had been “found” by her biological parents despite her reluctance to embrace them. In this searing, lyrical memoir, Sarah chronicles her painful journey from confusion and anger to acceptance and, finally, reunion–but not…

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  • Becoming Patrick: A Memoir

    Becoming Patrick: A Memoir

    by Patrick McMahon

    When Pat McMahon risks the love of the mother who raised him by seeking out the mother who gave him away, he transforms from a mild-mannered engineer into a frenetic detective. After he overcomes the challenges of existential angst, bureaucratic roadblocks, and unemployment, the phone…

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  • Coming Home to Self: The Adopted Child Grows Up

    Coming Home to Self: The Adopted Child Grows Up

    by Nancy Newton Verrier

    Although written with adult adoptees in mind, Coming Home to Self is a book that can help anyone who has had early childhood trauma or who feels as if he or she is living an unauthentic life. From understanding basic trauma and the neurological consequences of…

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  • The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child

    The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child

    by Nancy Newton Verrier

    The Primal Wound is a book which is revolutionizing the way we think about adoption. In its application of information about pre- and perinatal psychology, attachment, bonding, and loss, it clarifies the effects of separation from the birth mother on adopted children. In addition, it…

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  • Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama

    Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama

    by Marianne Novy

    Explores the ways in which novels and plays portray adoption, probing the cultural fictions that these literary representations have perpetuated. Through careful readings of works by Sophocles, Shakespeare, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Barbara Kingsolver, Edward Albee and others, Marianne Novy reveals how fiction has contributed…

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  • Gardening Secrets of the Dead

    Gardening Secrets of the Dead

    by Lee Herrick

    Memory, history, family, the future: these are the preoccupations of Lee Herrick’s Gardening Secrets of the Dead. Adoptee Author: Lee Herrick Publication Year: 2012 Critical Reviews Adoptee Reviews:  Other Reviews:  All Bookshop and Amazon links on this site are affiliate links. We earn a small commission to…

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  • This Many Miles from Desire

    This Many Miles from Desire

    by Lee Herrick

    The haunting music of Lee Herrick’s This Many Miles from Desire reflects the quest of the poet, an adoptee, to understand his place in the world: “one more child found in the world’s history/of found children.” Spiritually yearning, imagistically sharp, and lyrical, Herrick’s poems are…

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  • Sleeps with Knives

    Sleeps with Knives

    by Laramie Harlow

    Utterly raw, painfully true poems about adoption, child abuse, life in Wisconsin and Native American history. The poetry collection includes song lyrics from the author’s time as a musician. This is Laramie Harlow’s (Tsalgi-Shawnee-Euro) first chapbook. Adoptee Author: Laramie Harlow (aka Trace A. DeMeyer, Lara Trace…

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  • Becoming

    Becoming

    by Laramie Harlow

    15 unforgettable prose-poems and over 20 true short stories by NDN author Laramie Harlow. Becoming is the title of her impressive (and controversial) second collection. Her sensational first book SLEEPS WITH KNIVES was published in 2012 by Blue Hand Books. Her writing about being a…

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  • The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption

    The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption

    by Kathryn Joyce

    Adoption has long been enmeshed in the politics of reproductive rights, pitched as a “win-win” compromise in the never-ending abortion debate. But as Kathryn Joyce makes clear in The Child Catchers, adoption has lately become even more entangled in the conservative Christian agenda. The Child…

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  • Lost and Found: A Memoir of Mothers

    Lost and Found: A Memoir of Mothers

    by Kate St. Vincent Vogl

    She swore she would never let her birthmother into her life, but then her mom died of ovarian cancer and her birthmother found her through the obituary. Hard to argue with fate. Harder still to let go of childhood promises. This memoir explores what it…

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  • Assembling Self

    Assembling Self

    by Karen Belanger

    Born and adopted in 1959, at the age of two weeks, Karen had an inherent yearning her whole life to find more out about her biological background. Plagued by what seemed to be genetic health problems and illness the need for current family medical history…

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  • Paper Pavilion

    Paper Pavilion

    by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs

    Winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Paper Pavilion captures the theme of transnational adoption and a powerful search for a personal history and identity from Korea to America. Adoptee Author: Jennifer Kwon Dobbs Publication Year: 2007 Critical Reviews Adoptee Reviews:  Other Reviews:  All Bookshop and Amazon…

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  • Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

    Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

    by Jeanette Winterson

    Winner of the Whitbread Prize for best first fiction, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a coming-out novel from Winterson, the acclaimed author of The Passion and Sexing the Cherry. The narrator, Jeanette, cuts her teeth on the knowledge that she is one of…

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  • Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

    Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

    by Jeanette Winterson

    A memoir about a life’s work to find happiness. It is the story of how a painful past that Jeanette thought she’d written over and repainted rose to haunt her, sending her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her biological mother.…

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  • Beneath a Tall Tree

    Beneath a Tall Tree

    by Jean Strauss

    Bestselling author Jean Strauss’s memoir about her quest to unearth her past is an incredibly funny and touching journey that redefines the meaning of family and celebrates the universal connections that link us all. Adoptee Author: Jean Strauss Publication Year: 2001 Critical Reviews Adoptee Reviews:  Other Reviews: …

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  • The Language of Blood

    The Language of Blood

    by Jane Jeong Trenka

    With inventive and radiant prose that includes real and imagined letters, a fairy tale, a one-act play, crossword puzzles, and child-welfare manuals, Trenka recounts a childhood of insecurity, a battle with a stalker that escalates to a plot for her murder, and an extraordinary trip…

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  • Fugitive Visions: An Adoptee’s Return to Korea

    Fugitive Visions: An Adoptee’s Return to Korea

    by Jane Jeong Trenka

    Trenka’s award-winning first book, The Language of Blood, told the story of her upbringing in a white family in rural Minnesota. Now, in this searching and provocative memoir, Trenka explores a new question: Can she make an adult life for herself in Korea? Despite numerous…

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  • Being Adopted: The Lifelong Search for Self

    Being Adopted: The Lifelong Search for Self

    by David M. Brodzinsky, Ph.D., Marshall D. Schechter, M.D., and Robin Marantz Henig

    The voices of adoptees trace how adoption is experienced over a lifetime in this look at adoption that uses the Erik Erikson seven-stage life-cycle as its model and offers astute analysis of the adoption experience. Author: David M. Brodzinsky, Marshall D. Schechter, Robin Marantz Henig Publication…

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  • Twice Born: Memoirs of an Adopted Daughter (reissue)

    Twice Born: Memoirs of an Adopted Daughter (reissue)

    by Betty Jean Lifton

    In this significant and lasting account, Betty Jean Lifton, acclaimed author of several books on the psychology of the adopted, tells her own story of growing up at a time when adoptees were still in the closet. Twice Born recounts her early struggle with the…

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  • Lost and Found: The Adoption Experience (3rd edition)

    Lost and Found: The Adoption Experience (3rd edition)

    by Betty Jean Lifton

    The first edition of Betty Jean Lifton’s Lost and Found advanced the adoption rights movement in this country in 1979, challenging many states’ policies of maintaining closed birth records. For nearly three decades the book has topped recommended reading lists for those who seek to…

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  • Journey Of The Adopted Self: A Quest For Wholeness

    Journey Of The Adopted Self: A Quest For Wholeness

    by Betty Jean Lifton

    Betty Jean Lifton explores further the inner world of the adopted person. She breaks new ground as she traces the adopted child’s lifelong struggle to form an authentic sense of self. And she shows how both the symbolic and the literal search for roots becomes a…

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  • The Adoption Triangle (reissue)

    The Adoption Triangle (reissue)

    by Arthur D. Sorosky, M.D., Annette Baran, M.S.W., and Reuben Pannor, M.S.W.

    A classic and the first to deal with how sealed and open records affect adoptees, birth parents and adoptive parents. Originally published in 1978,” … it is as true and open as the changes advocated … comprehensive, factual, forward looking, totally honest, readable and thoughtful…

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  • The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade

    The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade

    by Ann Fessler

    In this deeply moving and myth-shattering work, Ann Fessler brings out into the open for the first time the astonishing untold history of the million and a half women who surrendered children for adoption due to enormous family and social pressure in the decades before…

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