Author: Editor
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Rooted in Adoption: A Collection of Adoptee Reflections
by Veronica Breaux and Shelby Kilgore
Rooted in Adoption: A Collection of Adoptee Reflections is a collection of short narratives from those who have been adopted. Adoptees of various ages, backgrounds, and experiences were asked discuss the joys of adoption and the struggles of living a life of secrecy and lost…
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Before Houdini (2)
by Jeremy Holt; illustrated by John Lucas
The exciting second volume of the After Houdini saga explores the origins of the elusive master of magic, the man who would become…Houdini. London, 1888. A shadowy killer stalks the streets of London, his appetite for blood unleashed upon the city’s lower classes. To defeat him, MI6…
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After Houdini (1)
by Jeremy Holt; illustrated by John Lucas and Adrian Crossa
Harry Houdini, master magician and covert spy for the United States, has been kidnapped. The only man who can save him is his estranged son Josef, who, like his father, knows the power of magic—and how it can be more than just an illusion. Josef…
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Everyone Was Falling
by JS Lee
On the weekend of July Fourth, shots are fired at a twentieth high school reunion in a small US town, killing fifty-six. Three survive. So begins Everyone Was Falling, an empowering novel of friendship and violence on the verge of Trump’s election. Lucy–a queer, Asian…
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Looking Into Alice’s Eyes : An Adoption Journey of Loss, Self-Discovery, and Peace
by Robert L. DuBois
This is an adoption story of two people; a birth mother and a son who briefly meet on a turbulent afternoon in 1967 in Flint, Michigan. They spend the next half century separated by a few miles and a million regrets. Various circumstances keep them…
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Permanent Home: A Memoir
by Mary Ellen Gambutti
In her charming collection, Mary Ellen offers glimpses of adopted life in an Air Force family. We travel from her South Carolina birthplace, through several states, and three years in Tokyo. A taste of permanence is found in their New Jersey home, but her quest…
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Adoption’s Hidden History: Steps to Sealing the Records (Vol. 2)
by Mary S. Payne
An estimated six million Americans are adopted. The development of laws and regulations facilitating this process has been shrouded in mystery. “Adoption’s Hidden History” is for anyone who has ever been touched by adoption. From Myra Clark Gaines’ nineteenth century court fight for recognition as…
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Adoption’s Hidden History: From Native American Tribes to Locked Lives (Vol. 1)
by Mary S. Payne
Adoptions are finalized daily across America. Like the root system of a giant oak, tentacles of its history are submerged in years of human experience. Native Americans adopted children and adults into their tribes before pilgrims settled in the New World. Early-day adoption advocates took…
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Introducing the Adoptee Reading Bookshop
We’re happy to share that Adoptee Reading now has a storefront on Bookshop.org. For those unfamiliar, Bookshop is a website launched earlier this year that exclusively sells books and shares all profits with independent bookstores throughout the United States. Adoptee Reading is participating in Bookshop’s…
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Shadows of the Night: How One Man Survived the Trauma of Adoption, the Snares of the Music Business, and Found His Birthmother and Seven Sisters
by D.L. Byron
A gifted young man endured a tormented childhood at the hands of his mentally troubled adoptive mother. Told that his birth mother had died to give him life, he shouldered the blame yet still found the strength to attempt the impossible. With a week’s worth…
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Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid pro quo?
by Gonda Van Steen
This book presents a committed quest to unravel and document the postwar adoption networks that placed more than 3,000 Greek children in the United States, in a movement accelerated by the aftermath of the Greek Civil War and by the new conditions of the global…
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Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear
by Matthew Salesses
Matt Kim is always tired. He keeps passing out. His cat is dead. His wife and daughter have left him. He’s estranged from his adoptive family. People bump into him on the street as if he isn’t there. He is pretty sure he’s disappearing. His…
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100 Adoptee-Authored Books from the Decade 2010-2019
To commemorate the end of the decade, Adoptee Reading has curated a list of 100 adoptee-authored books published between 2010 and 2019. This is not a comprehensive list; we were forced to leave out numerous additional titles in order to get down to a perfect…
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Searching for Mom: A Memoir
by Sara Easterly (with Linda Easterly)
Searching for Mom is a “disarmingly honest” mother-daughter story. Sara Easterly spent a lifetime looking for the perfect mother. As an adoptee she had difficulties attaching to her mother, struggled with her faith, lived the effects of intergenerational wounding, and felt an inherent sense of being…
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Palimpsest: Documents From a Korean Adoption
by Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom
Thousands of South Korean children were adopted around the world in the 1970s and 1980s. More than nine thousand found their new home in Sweden, including the cartoonist Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom, who was adopted when she was two years old. Throughout her childhood she struggled…
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Finding Fernanda: Two Mothers, One Child, and a Cross-Border Search for Truth
by Erin Siegal
The dramatic story of how an American housewife discovered that the Guatemalan child she was about to adopt had been stolen from her birth mother. Over the last decade, nearly 200,000 children have been adopted into the United States, 25,000 of whom came from Guatemala. Finding…
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Hey, Kiddo
by Jarrett J. Krosoczka
In kindergarten, Jarrett Krosoczka’s teacher asks him to draw his family, with a mommy and a daddy. But Jarrett’s family is much more complicated than that. His mom is an addict, in and out of rehab, and in and out of Jarrett’s life. His father…
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A Twenty Year Journey: An Adoptee’s Search for Answers
by Cathryn B. Stanley
Secrets, sacrifice, lies, love, abandonment, acceptance, grief, joy, regret, jubilation, and fortitude are nestled within the pages of A Twenty-Year Journey. Join me as I share the twists and turns of my pilgrimage with you. Incredibly my circle of existence is quite small, yet the…
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Voices from Across the Sea: An Adoption Memoir Uniting Two Worlds
by Lora V. Keleher
A memoir sharing my journey to South Korea to meet my biological family and the feelings I experienced growing up as an interracial adoptee. It touches on pain, abandonment, alienation, racism, love, and more. Adoptee Author: Lora V. Keleher Publication Year: 2019 Critical Reviews: Adoptee…
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Inconvenient Daughter
by Lauren J. Sharkey
Rowan Kelly knows she’s lucky. After all, if she hadn’t been adopted by Marie and Joseph, she could have spent her days in a rice paddy, or a windowless warehouse assembling iPhones–they make iPhones in Korea, right? Either way, slowly dying of boredom on Long…
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Who Am I: A Journal to Guide the Search for Your Birth Family
by Rebecca Crofoot
Rebecca Crofoot served as a caseworker for the Nebraska Children’s Home Society for over forty-two years. About thirty of those years were dedicated to assisting clients with search and reunion. Because people are increasingly searching without the assistance of an adoption expert, Crofoot developed this…
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Family Medical History: Unknown/Adopted
by Nancy Kacirek Feldman and Rebecca Crofoot
Knowing where you came from often determines who you are. At the age of forty-five, Nancy Feldman knew how her doctor appointment would go. They would ask her about her family’s health history, and she would hear the doctor’s familiar sigh after she answered, “I…
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Goodbye, SaraJane: A Foster Child Writes Letters to Her Mother
by Sequoya Griffin
Dear Mama Katherine, This is your daughter SaraJane. I know you named me Sequoya at birth and I haven’t seen you since I was ten-years-old. I want you to know that SaraJane is the name my adoptive mother gave me. I was going to look…
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The Son with Two Moms
by Tony Hynes
Tony was taken in at the age of three by Mary Hynes and Janet Simons, after being separated from his mother, who suffered from schizophrenia. After that time, he was shuffled in and out of his grandmothers home before being placed in an orphanage, where…
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Out of the Birdcage: Memoirs of an Adoptee
by JH Dunn
Based on a true story of an adoptee’s search for identity and purpose. Never quite feeling like she fit in, struggling in relationships, and getting in trouble, until she learns about a group that helps adoptees and birth families search for each other. Searching for…
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They Chose Me: An Adoption Story
by Denise Lynnette Defoe
Raw and informative, They Chose Me: An Adoption Story shares the gripping story of Denise Defoe who was relinquished for adoption at birth. Adopted at the age of two by a loving family, Denise still struggled intensely with feelings of grief, abandonment, lack of self…
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Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related.: A Memoir
by Jenny Heijun Wills
Jenny Heijun Wills was born in Korea and adopted as an infant into a white family in small-town Canada. In her late twenties, she reconnected with her first family and returned to Seoul where she spent four months getting to know other adoptees, as well…
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The Politics of Reproduction: Adoption, Abortion, and Surrogacy in the Age of Neoliberalism
Edited by Modhumita Roy and Mary Thompson
The Politics of Reproduction: Adoption, Abortion and Surrogacy in the Age of Neoliberalism uniquely brings together three sites of reproduction and reproductive politics to demonstrate their entanglement in creating or restricting options for family-making. The original essays in this collection—which draw from a wide range of disciplinary and…
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My Name Is Why
by Lemn Sissay
How does a government steal a child and then imprison him? How does it keep it a secret? This story is how. At the age of seventeen, after a childhood in a foster family followed by six years in care homes, Norman Greenwood was given…
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8 Adoptee-Authored Books Published (so far) in 2019
We’ve found eight new books by adoptees published so far (January-June) in 2019. Know of a book we’re missing? Let us know here. Who Am I Really: An Adoptee Memoir by Damon Davis “Who Am I Really?” is a question many adoptees ask when they…