Including More Than 450 Adoptee-Recommended Titles!

Books About Domestic U.S. Adoptions

  • The Search for Anna Fisher

    The Search for Anna Fisher

    by Florence Fisher

    The document lay in the bottom of the bureau drawer. Written in longhand was a name: Anna Fisher. “Who is Anna Fisher?” seven-year-old Florence asked her mother. The woman yanked the paper out of her hands and told her never again to mention that name.…

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  • The Secret of Me: A Novel in Poems

    The Secret of Me: A Novel in Poems

    by Meg Kearney

    The acclaimed story of an adopted teenager’s quest to find her place among family, friends, and the wider world. Fourteen-year old Lizzie, as well as her older brother and sister, were adopted as infants. But facts are not feelings, and what it feels like to…

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  • The Son with Two Moms

    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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  • The Sound of Hope: A True Story of an Adoptee’s Quest for Her Origins

    The Sound of Hope: A True Story of an Adoptee’s Quest for Her Origins

    by Anne Bauer

    Anne Bauer, an adoptee, cannot pretend that she had another life and another family before being adopted. Much of Anne’s childhood was spent wondering about her other mother. She desperately wanted to know where she was, what she looked like and most importantly, why she…

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  • The Syrian Jewelry Box: A Daughter’s Journey for Truth

    The Syrian Jewelry Box: A Daughter’s Journey for Truth

    by Carina Sue Burns

    Carina Rourke is a young American growing up in blissful innocence in the Middle East until at age fifteen she is captivated by an obsessive desire to search inside of her mother’s forbidden jewelry box. Carina discovers a shocking family secret. On the heels of her discovery,…

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  • The Tangled Red Thread

    The Tangled Red Thread

    by Elle Cuardaigh

    Born into the social experiment of closed adoption in the early 1960s, Noelle was taken home directly from the hospital at the age of three days. Her early life in rural Washington state seemed idyllic. With loving parents, two brothers, and her beloved pets, she…

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  • The Truth Book: A Memoir

    The Truth Book: A Memoir

    by Joy Castro

    Adopted as a baby and raised by a devout Jehovah’s Witness family, Joy Castro is constantly reminded to tell the truth no matter what the consequences. Nevertheless, Castro finds this tenet to be the most violated. Here, in her very own Truth Book, Castro bears…

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  • The Truth So Far: A Detective’s Journey To Reunite with Her Birth Family

    The Truth So Far: A Detective’s Journey To Reunite with Her Birth Family

    by Jennifer Dyan Ghoston

    How do you use a document like the amended birth certificate given to an adoptee as a legal representation of the entire truth? In this memoir, Jennifer Dyan Ghoston examines that question based on her role in law enforcement for over two decades. She shares…

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  • They Chose Me: An Adoption Story

    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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  • Three Little Words: A Memoir

    Three Little Words: A Memoir

    by Ashley Rhodes-Courter

    An inspiring true story of the tumultuous nine years Ashley Rhodes-Courter spent in the foster care system, and how she triumphed over painful memories and real-life horrors to ultimately find her own voice. “Sunshine, you’re my baby and I’m your only mother. You must mind…

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  • Three More Words

    Three More Words

    by Ashley Rhodes-Courter

    Ashley Rhodes-Courter spent a harrowing nine years of her life in fourteen different foster homes. Her memoir, Three Little Words, captivated audiences everywhere and went on to become a New York Times bestseller. Now Ashley reveals the nuances of life after foster care: College and…

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  • Through Adopted Eyes: A Collection of Memoirs From Adoptees

    Through Adopted Eyes: A Collection of Memoirs From Adoptees

    Edited by Elena S. Hall

    Through Adopted Eyes explores the world of adoption from the viewpoint of adoptees. Russian adoptee Elena S. Hall shares her own story and thoughts on the subject of adoption in addition to interviews from other adoptees of different ages, heritages, and perspectives. Whether you are…

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  • Toxic Mom Toolkit: Discovering a Happy Life Despite Toxic Parenting

    Toxic Mom Toolkit: Discovering a Happy Life Despite Toxic Parenting

    by Rayne Wolfe

    Toxic Mom Toolkit takes on super toxic mothers with humor, kindness, and practical tools to help readers build a peaceful and happy life. The book includes Wolfe’s memoir of growing up brave and scrappy in 1950s San Francisco, the daughter of three mothers: an absent…

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  • Twice a Daughter: A Search for Identity, Family, and Belonging

    Twice a Daughter: A Search for Identity, Family, and Belonging

    by Julie Ryan McGue

    Julie is adopted. She is also a twin. Because their adoption was closed, she and her sister lack both a health history and their adoption papers―which becomes an issue for Julie when, at forty-eight years old, she finds herself facing several serious health issues. To…

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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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  • Two Peas In A Separated Pod: A True Story of Adoption

    Two Peas In A Separated Pod: A True Story of Adoption

    by Jeannie Lachman and Carole Sanguedolce

    Take a journey with two women on the road to discoveries and realizations. Jeannie and Carole write about their lives growing up. Each is unaware of the other. Jeannie is raised in the Bronx, New York. She grows up knowing that she is adopted and…

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  • Under My Bed and Other Essays

    Under My Bed and Other Essays

    by Jody Keisner

    Jody Keisner was raised in rural Nebraska towns by a volatile father and kind but passive mother. As a young adult living alone for the first time, she began a nighttime ritual of checking under her bed each night, not sure who she was afraid…

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  • Undercover Debutante: The Search for My Birth Parents and a Bald Husband

    Undercover Debutante: The Search for My Birth Parents and a Bald Husband

    by Charlotte Laws

    Forthcoming August 2019. Available for preorder. Dr. Charlotte Laws, the most well-known unknown, is a TV star, best-selling author, and world-renowned advocate for women, animals, and the LGBTQ community. NBC News calls her a crusader. BuzzFeed voted her one of the 30 fiercest women in…

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  • Unnatural Selection: A Memoir of Adoption and Wilderness

    Unnatural Selection: A Memoir of Adoption and Wilderness

    by Andrea Ross; foreword by Miriam Peskowitz

    Adopted at birth, Andrea Ross grew up inhabiting two ecosystems: one was her tangible, adoptive family, the other her birth family, whose mysterious landscape was hidden from her. In this coming-of-age memoir, Ross narrates how in her early twenties, while working as a ranger in Grand Canyon National Park, she…

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  • Unstoppable

    Unstoppable

    by Tim Green

    If anyone understands the phrase “tough luck,” it’s Harrison. As a foster kid in a cruel home, he knows his dream of one day playing in the NFL is a longshot. Then Harrison is brought into a new home with kind, loving parents—his new dad…

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  • Walk Away (Kindle Single)

    Walk Away (Kindle Single)

    by Michele Leavitt

    Walk Away is the unflinching and inspiring story of how author Michele Leavitt lived through the violence of her adolescence, how that violence haunted her through her escape to college and law school, and how she ultimately came to rise out of it to a…

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  • Waving Backwards

    Waving Backwards

    by V.L. Brunskill

    Imagine not knowing who you are, until you find yourself in a statue 800 miles from home. Join intensely passionate and fiercely independent New York college student Lara Bonavito on an unforgettable journey of self-discovery in sigh-worthy Savannah, Georgia. Adopted into an abusive and impoverished…

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  • We Are All Human Beings: An Adoptee Ponders

    We Are All Human Beings: An Adoptee Ponders

    by Paul Kimball

    Paul Kimball, a biracial adoptee, explores his own abandonment issues as he searches and eventually reunites with his birth parents. After a seemingly joyous reunion, his birth mother, a Caucasian professional cellist, rejects him. This causes him to seek out his Armenian birth father who,…

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  • We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America

    We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America

    by Roxanna Asgarian

    The shocking, deeply reported story of a murder-suicide that claimed the lives of six children–and a searing indictment of the American foster care system. On March 26, 2018, rescue workers discovered a crumpled SUV and the bodies of two women and multiple children at the…

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  • What White Parents Should Know about Transracial Adoption: An Adoptee’s Perspective on Its History, Nuances, and Practices

    What White Parents Should Know about Transracial Adoption: An Adoptee’s Perspective on Its History, Nuances, and Practices

    by Melissa Guida-Richards

    If you’re the white parent of a transracially or internationally adopted child, you may have been told that if you try your best and work your hardest, good intentions and a whole lot of love will be enough to give your child the security, attachment,…

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  • When We Become Ours: A YA Adoptee Anthology

    When We Become Ours: A YA Adoptee Anthology

    Edited by Shannon Gibney and Nicole Chung

    There is no universal adoption experience, and no two adoptees have the same story. This anthology for teens edited by Shannon Gibney and Nicole Chung contains a wide range of powerful, poignant, and evocative stories in a variety of genres. These tales from fifteen bestselling,…

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  • When You Never Said Goodbye: An Adoptee’s Search for Her Birth Mother: A Novel in Poems and Journal Entries

    When You Never Said Goodbye: An Adoptee’s Search for Her Birth Mother: A Novel in Poems and Journal Entries

    by Meg Kearney

    A student at NYU in Greenwich Village, Liz McLane is pursuing her dream of becoming a poet and, at the same time, determined to find her birth mother, no matter what the results may be. Through her journals, Liz records her struggle to navigate adoption…

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  • Where We Come From

    Where We Come From

    by Diane Wilson, Sun Yung Shin, Shannon Gibney, John Coy; Illustrated by Dion MBD

    In this unique collaboration, four authors lyrically explore where they each come from―literally and metaphorically―as well as what unites all of us as humans. Richly layered illustrations connect past and present, making for an accessible and visually striking look at history, family, and identity. We…

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