Including More Than 450 Adoptee-Recommended Titles!

Books About Domestic U.S. Adoptions

  • Everything Is Possible: Finding the Faith and Courage to Follow Your Dreams

    Everything Is Possible: Finding the Faith and Courage to Follow Your Dreams

    by Jen Bricker with Sheryl Berk

    Jen Bricker was born without legs. Shocked and uncertain they could care for her, her biological parents gave her up for adoption. In her loving adoptive home, there was just one simple rule: “Never say ‘can’t.’” And pretty soon, there was nothing this small but…

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  • Everything You Ever Wanted: A Memoir

    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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  • Faith, Hope & Perseverance: An Adoptee’s Journey To Finding Biological Family

    Faith, Hope & Perseverance: An Adoptee’s Journey To Finding Biological Family

    by Diane Gray

    It is our human right to know who we are. After her adoptive parents passed away, Diane decided to take the DNA plunge to find her biological family. Learn how she found her biological family after years of wondering who she was and why she…

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  • Family Found: The DNA Journey

    Family Found: The DNA Journey

    by Douglas M. Dubrish

    I am grateful being adopted as a toddler and having an early life of mostly fond memories. My adoptive mother had passed, and my adoptive father remarried. I had a good career and a family of my own. But, being adopted nagged at me. I…

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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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  • Family Medical History: Unknown/Adopted

    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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  • Family Resemblance: Finding Yourself in Others

    Family Resemblance: Finding Yourself in Others

    by Eric Mueller

    Family Resemblance is a multiyear photo project that documents and celebrates people who are genetically related and bear a strong resemblance to each other. As an adopted person, photographer Eric Mueller always wondered how it would feel to look like someone else. At age forty-five,…

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  • Finding Family: My Search for Roots and the Secrets in My DNA

    Finding Family: My Search for Roots and the Secrets in My DNA

    by Richard Hill

    Finding Family: My Search for Roots and the Secrets in My DNA is the highly suspenseful account of an adoptee trying to reclaim the biological family denied him by sealed birth records. This fascinating quest, including the author’s landmark use of DNA testing, takes readers on an…

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  • Finding Joi: A True Story of Faith, Family, and Love

    Finding Joi: A True Story of Faith, Family, and Love

    by Joi R. Fisher

    We all have a right to know about our birthright. Finding Joi: A True Story of Faith, Family, and Love centers around one woman’s plight to connect the dots to find her birth parents after being adopted at two months old by a loving family…

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  • Finding My Way Home

    Finding My Way Home

    by Kirsten Weatherford

    Finding My Way Home is a journey. It is a journey across the ocean, across the country, and out of the adoptee fog. The roadmap that was hidden away by a 1970s closed adoption is unearthed, and the trail begins to clear. It leads not…

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  • Finding Vicki Sue

    Finding Vicki Sue

    by Barbara Saunders Brownell

    Finding Vicki Sue is an engaging memoir full of history and insight which chronicles growing up in South Bend, Indiana as an adoptee in the 1960s and beyond. Fifty-six years after her birth, the author’s adoption file was obtained which explains the missing piece of…

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  • Fixing the Fates: An Adoptee’s Story of Truth and Lies

    Fixing the Fates: An Adoptee’s Story of Truth and Lies

    by Diane Dewey

    The secrets, lies, and layers of deception about Diane Dewey’s origins were meant for her protection―but eventually, they imploded. Living with her family in suburban Philadelphia, Diane had grown up knowing she was born in Stuttgart and adopted at age one from an orphanage. She’d…

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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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  • For Black Girls Like Me

    For Black Girls Like Me

    by Mariama J. Lockington

    Makeda June Kirkland is eleven-years-old, adopted, and black. Her parents and big sister are white, and even though she loves her family very much, Makeda often feels left out. When Makeda’s family moves from Maryland to New Mexico, she leaves behind her best friend, Lena―…

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  • Forbidden Love

    Forbidden Love

    by Lisa Jones Gentry as told by Joe Steele

    Forbidden Love is the true story of Father William Grau, a black Catholic priest, and Sister Sophie Legocki, a white Polish-American nun who, in the segregated fifties, defied the church and society with their passionate secret love affair that lasted for nearly a decade and…

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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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  • Found: Adopted Friends Search for their Birth Families

    Found: Adopted Friends Search for their Birth Families

    by Trish Diggins and Sherri Craig-Evans

    Lifelong friends–both adoptees–decided they would take a chance and search for their birth parents using online DNA kits and social media. It turns out, that was the easy part. What happened over the next five years was much more difficult–trying to forge relationships with a…

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  • Fumbling Toward Divinity: The Adoption Scriptures

    Fumbling Toward Divinity: The Adoption Scriptures

    by Craig Hickman

    Craig Hickman had had enough of the secrets and cover-ups and lies and was determined to solve the mystery of his roots. An estimated 7 million Americans are adopted. Depending on their age, many were adopted under the secrecy and shame of the closed adoption…

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  • Goodbye Hypervigilance: Healing Adoptee Worry

    Goodbye Hypervigilance: Healing Adoptee Worry

    by Lora K. Joy; illustrated by Laura Foote

    Goodbye Hypervigilance is a true story about my experience realizing how adoption trauma had put me on high alert my entire life. My need to control things was catastrophic. Luckily, I have an adoptee competent therapist who helped me identify this old coping mechanism. My…

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  • Goodbye, SaraJane: A Foster Child Writes Letters to Her Mother

    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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  • Growing in the Dark: Adoption Secrecy and Its Consequences

    Growing in the Dark: Adoption Secrecy and Its Consequences

    by Janine M. Baer

    Generations of adults who were adopted as children have been kept in the dark about their original identities. The law sealing birth records forever, even to the adopted person, passed in 1935 in California, sweeping adoption´s emotional complexities under the rug and making it possible to…

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  • Healing Tree: An Adoptee’s Story about Hurting, Healing, and Letting the Light Shine Through

    Healing Tree: An Adoptee’s Story about Hurting, Healing, and Letting the Light Shine Through

    by Danielle Gaudette

    “Our adopted angel”–that’s what Danielle’s adoptive parents called her. She grew up adored, doted on, unconditionally loved. It wasn’t until she was in college that she first felt a gnawing curiosity about her roots. From time to time, she would wonder: Where did this face…

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  • Hey, Kiddo

    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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  • Home by Now

    Home by Now

    by Meg Kearney

    The characters of Meg Kearney’s gritty second poetry collection travel the shadows and edges of modern life. Searching for home and knowing that, once found, home might dissolve without warning, Kearney carves a richly lyric poetry. You will hear the voices of this striking book…

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  • Home is Where the Heart is: An Adoption and Biological Reunion Story

    Home is Where the Heart is: An Adoption and Biological Reunion Story

    by Jenni Alpert

    Years after being taken away from her birth parents as a baby by the state and then being adopted out of the foster care system at age four, singer-songwriter Jenni Alpert decided to search for her birth father with the help of a private investigator,…

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  • Hunting Shadows: An Adoptee’s Journey

    Hunting Shadows: An Adoptee’s Journey

    by Dan Sandifer

    “Today class, we are going to talk a little about genetics” With these words, Hunter begins a journey to reveal what it means to be adopted. As he sets out to discover all the branches of his family tree, he finds obstacles at every turn.…

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  • I Didn’t Know I Was Black Until You Told Me

    I Didn’t Know I Was Black Until You Told Me

    by Thomas Kirst

    An inspirational book detailing the profound changes in the life of a black child being left at a hospital after birth. Thirteen months into his life being adopted by a white couple that migrated from Europe before World War II, who would later adopt over…

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  • I Knew You by Name: The Search for My Lost Mother

    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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