Including More Than 450 Adoptee-Recommended Titles!

Author: Editor

  • The Last Year

    The Last Year

    by Amelia Banis

    Being adopted is one thing. Being adopted and navigating the complexities of having unexpected relationships with both biological parents is something quite different. Having two sets of parents can be an incredible gift, but it can also be unimaginably complicated and challenging. Its often filled…

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  • An Adoptee Lexicon

    An Adoptee Lexicon

    by Karen Pickell

    Lyrical and informative, An Adoptee Lexicon is a glossary of adoption terminology from the viewpoint of an adult adoptee. Contemplating religion, politics, science, and human rights, Karen Pickell, who was born and adopted in the late 1960s, intersperses personal commentary and snippets from her own experience with…

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  • Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption

    Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption

    Susan Devan Harness

    In Bitterroot Susan Devan Harness traces her journey to understand the complexities and struggles of being an American Indian child adopted by a white couple and living in the rural American West. When Harness was fifteen years old, she questioned her adoptive father about her “real” parents.…

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  • Frankie and Friends Talk Adoption

    Frankie and Friends Talk Adoption

    by Pam Kroskie and Marcie Keithley

    Frankie and Friends will help the youngest of adopted children and their parents navigate through the feelings often experienced but difficult to articulate. The narrator is Frankie, a lovable character who warmly validates what an adopted child may be feeling and that they are all okay!…

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  • Interrogation Room

    Interrogation Room

    by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs

    In Interrogation Room, award-winning poet Jennifer Kwon Dobbs’s second collection, poems restore redacted speech and traverse forbidden borders to confront the unending Korean War’s divisions of kinship, self, and imagination. Adoptee Author: Jennifer Kwon Dobbs Publication Year: 2018 Critical Reviews: Adoptee Reviews:  Other Reviews:  All Bookshop and Amazon…

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  • My Life: The Journey Of An Adoptee

    My Life: The Journey Of An Adoptee

    by Jim Armstrong

    My Life is an autobiography of my life as an adopted child. Adoption can be an emotional roller coaster for many adopted children. In this book i have provided my life journey and wish to share my journey so other adopted people know that they are…

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  • Famous Adopted People

    Famous Adopted People

    by Alice Stephens

    Lisa Pearl is an American teaching English in Japan and the situation there―thanks mostly to her spontaneous, hard-partying ways―has become problematic. Now she’s in Seoul, South Korea, with her childhood best-friend Mindy. The young women share a special bond: they are both Korean-born adoptees into…

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  • Odyssey of a Belief: An Adoptee’s Journal

    Odyssey of a Belief: An Adoptee’s Journal

    by Joe Wh. Zychik

    Odyssey of a Belief is a compelling chronicle about triumph over seemingly hopeless circumstances. The author spent the first six years of his life in eight different homes and two foster centers while being parented by seven different mothers, one grandmother, and who knows how many…

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  • New Books Listed at Adoptee Reading

    New Books Listed at Adoptee Reading

    We’ve just added more books to the Adoptee Reading catalog. Check them out! All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir by Nicole Chung Forthcoming October 2018. Available for pre-order. What does it mean to lose your roots―within your culture, within your family―and what happens when…

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  • All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir

    All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir

    by Nicole Chung

    What does it mean to lose your roots―within your culture, within your family―and what happens when you find them? Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. From childhood,…

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  • Little Fires Everywhere

    Little Fires Everywhere

    by Celeste Ng

    From the bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You, a riveting novel that traces the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family and the enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their lives. In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned – from…

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  • Found and Lost: An Adoption, An Agency and A Search for Self

    Found and Lost: An Adoption, An Agency and A Search for Self

    by Suzette J. Brownstein

    Growing up with a secret is never easy. While mine seems innocuous now, it caused me a lot of pain in 1978. As an adoptee from the closed system where secrecy ruled, I felt adopted but never born. So when my birth father called me…

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  • Adoption Is a Lifelong Journey

    Adoption Is a Lifelong Journey

    by Kelly DiBenedetto, Katie Gorczyca, and Jennifer Eckert

    Meet Charlie, an adoptee who opens his heart and shares what’s on his mind through various phases as he grows up in his adoptive home. As the narrator of Adoption Is a Lifelong Journey, Charlie invites readers to see the adoption journey from the perspective…

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  • Sorry to Disrupt the Peace

    Sorry to Disrupt the Peace

    by Patrick Cottrell

    Helen Moran is thirty-two years old, single, childless, college-educated, and partially employed as a guardian of troubled young people in New York. She’s accepting a delivery from IKEA in her shared studio apartment when her uncle calls to break the news: Helen’s adoptive brother is…

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  • Other Words for Grief

    Other Words for Grief

    by Lisa Marie Rollins

    “The poems gathered in Other Words For Grief, are a spotlight turned inward. As Lisa Marie Rollins relentlessly searches the interior with a hot light scanning blood and baby pictures; sexual encounters nearly gone awry as well as family encounters that fall short, we are moved…

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  • You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are: An Adoptee’s Journey Through The American Adoption Experience

    You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are: An Adoptee’s Journey Through The American Adoption Experience

    by Rudy Owens

    Nearly 50 years after he was relinquished for adoption, Rudy Owens learned how fortunate life can be. In 2014 in San Diego, Owens met his biological half-sister for the first time. That meeting inspired Owens to tell his adoption story set against the larger adoption…

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  • The Adoption Machine: The Dark History of Ireland’s Mother & Baby Homes and the Inside Story of How “Tuam 800” Became a Global Scandal

    The Adoption Machine: The Dark History of Ireland’s Mother & Baby Homes and the Inside Story of How “Tuam 800” Became a Global Scandal

    by Paul Jude Redmond

    MAY 2014. The Irish public woke to the horrific discovery of a mass grave containing the remains of almost 800 babies in the “Angels’ Plot’ of Tuam’s Mother and Baby Home. What followed would rock the last vestiges of Catholic Ireland, enrage an increasingly secularised…

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  • The Girl and the Grove

    The Girl and the Grove

    by Eric Smith

    Teenager Leila’s life is full of challenges. From bouncing around the foster care system to living with seasonal affective disorder, she’s never had an easy road. Leila keeps herself busy with her passion for environmental advocacy, monitoring the Urban Ecovists message board and joining a…

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  • Parallel Universes: The Story of Rebirth

    Parallel Universes: The Story of Rebirth

    by David B. Bohl

    In this poignant and powerful memoir, David B. Bohl reveals the inner turmoil and broad spectrum of warring emotions shame, anger, triumph, shyness, pride he experienced growing up as a relinquished boy. Adopted at birth by a prosperous family, Bohl battled throughout his earlier years to keep…

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  • Keurium

    Keurium

    by JS Lee

    Shay Stone lies in a hospital bed, catatonic—dead to the world. Her family thinks it’s a ploy for attention. Doctors believe it’s the result of an undisclosed trauma. At the mercy of memories and visitations, Shay unearths secrets that may have led to her collapse.…

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  • Spare the Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America

    Spare the Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America

    by Stacey Patton

    Why do so many African Americans have such a special attachment to whupping children? Studies show that nearly 80 percent of black parents see spanking, popping, pinching, and beating as reasonable, effective ways to teach respect and to protect black children from the streets, incarceration,…

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  • That Mean Old Yesterday: A Memoir

    That Mean Old Yesterday: A Memoir

    by Stacey Patton

    An astonishing coming-of-age memoir by a young woman who survived the foster care system to become an award-winning journalist.  On a rainy night in November 1999, a shoeless Stacey Patton, promising student at NYU, approached her adoptive parents’ house with a gun in her hand.…

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  • The Lucky Daughter

    The Lucky Daughter

    by Mariama J. Lockington

    Poetry. “Mariama J. Lockington’s The Lucky Daughter digs deep into the physicality of moving through this world as a queer woman of color. These poems – about race, sexuality, families (found, formed, and inherited) – are brutal in their honesty and beauty. “a girl” Lockington…

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  • A Family from Barra: An Adoption Story

    A Family from Barra: An Adoption Story

    by Beryl Martin

    Beryl Martin grew up as Pat Ridge, daughter of Nellie and George. George worked at the Municipal Milk Department; Nellie fostered children, to whom she was mostly cruel. Roaming Wellington as a child and schoolgirl, Pat started work at the Zig Zag factory at 14;…

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  • Check Out Our New Look!

    Check Out Our New Look!

    Adoptee Reading has undergone a refresh. Now you can find more of the books you’re looking for directly from our home page. Come in and take a look around.

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  • Pop-up Book Club with Caitríona Palmer

    Pop-up Book Club with Caitríona Palmer

    Karen Pickell, founder of Adoptee Reading, will join Haley Radke, host of the podcast Adoptees On, in moderating a pop-up book club to discuss the memoir An Affair with My Mother. Author Caitríona Palmer will join the discussion, which will take place April 3-30 via a…

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  • Killing Karoline

    Killing Karoline

    by Sara-Jayne King

    Born Karoline King in 1980 in Johannesburg South Africa, Sara-Jayne (as she will later be called by her adoptive parents) is the result of an affair, illegal under apartheid’s Immorality Act, between a white British woman and her black South African employee.Her story reveals the…

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  • The Baby Scoop Era: Unwed Mothers, Infant Adoption and Forced Surrender

    The Baby Scoop Era: Unwed Mothers, Infant Adoption and Forced Surrender

    by Karen Wilson-Buterbaugh

    An expose of unethical and coercive adoption industry practices during a short period in American history known as the Baby Scoop Era (Post WWII – 1972). By sharing the actual printed words of social caseworkers, maternity home personnel, lawyers, judges, medical and mental health practitioners,…

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  • Not My White Savior: A Memoir in Poems

    Not My White Savior: A Memoir in Poems

    by Julayne Lee

    Julayne Lee was born in South Korea to a mother she never knew. When she was an infant, she was adopted by a white Christian family in Minnesota, where she was sent to grow up. Not My White Savior is a memoir in poems, exploring what it…

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  • Somebody’s Daughter

    Somebody’s Daughter

    by Zara H. Phillips

    Zara H. Phillips seemed to live a charmed life — backing singer to the stars with an incredible career here and across the Atlantic — but her smile masked a difficult childhood and the reality that she was adopted as a baby in the ’60s.…

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