Including More Than 450 Adoptee-Recommended Titles!

Books About or Written By Female Adoptees

  • Connecting Threads: Five Siblings Lost and Found

    Connecting Threads: Five Siblings Lost and Found

    by EM Blake

    A graphic memoir about siblings of Indigenous and European-American heritage who are taken from their first family, placed in foster care, and most were adopted-a story of the journey to find each other and their first family. This is the story of the complex needs…

    read more…

  • Cricket: Secret Child of a Sixties Supermodel

    Cricket: Secret Child of a Sixties Supermodel

    by Susan Fedorko

    Susie always knew she was adopted out at the early age of eleven months. She discovers at the age of forty who her biological family is. Susie discovers her birth mother is the first Native American supermodel “Cathee Dahmen.” This is her story. Adoptee Author: Susan…

    read more…

  • Cries of the Soul: The True Story of a Korean Adoptee’s Fight to Survive

    Cries of the Soul: The True Story of a Korean Adoptee’s Fight to Survive

    by Khara Niné

    In 1970, shortly after the death of her mother, and without the consent or even the knowledge of her father, a barely one year old girl is put up for foreign adoption in South Korea. She ends up in an adoptive family where she spends…

    read more…

  • Crossing the Cherry Blossom Sea: An Adoptee’s Memoir

    Crossing the Cherry Blossom Sea: An Adoptee’s Memoir

    by M. Rosales

    In this compelling memoir, M. Rosales recalls the day she was torn away from South Korea at the age of five alongside her younger sister, to live with an American family. With barely any memories of her former life, Rosales navigates the complexities of loss,…

    read more…

  • Daughter Reassembled: An Adoption Search and Reunion Memoir

    Daughter Reassembled: An Adoption Search and Reunion Memoir

    by Pam Cates

    Pam Cates had led a charmed life. As a mother, wife, daughter, sister, and artist, she had everything she’d always dreamed of–a big house in the country, a wonderful husband, lovely daughter, her parents living next door, and time to paint and garden. She always…

    read more…

  • Dear Wonderful You: Letters to Adopted & Fostered Youth

    Dear Wonderful You: Letters to Adopted & Fostered Youth

    Edited by Diane René Christian and Mei-Mei Akwai Ellerman, PhD

    A powerful book filled with thoughtful and inspiring letters. This anthology was written by a global community of adult adoptees and adults who were fostered. Each letter was penned to the upcoming generation of adopted and fostered youth. Editors: Diane René Christian, Mei-Mei Akwai Ellerman Adoptee…

    read more…

  • Decoding Our Origins: The Lived Experiences of Colombian Adoptees

    Decoding Our Origins: The Lived Experiences of Colombian Adoptees

    Edited by Abby Forero-Hilty

    Decoding Our Origins: The Lived Experiences of Colombian Adoptees is written by seventeen authors who were born in Colombia and adopted internationally. Their individual stories illustrate different aspects of the transracial adoption experience. The traumatic loss of their mothers, culture and identities; racism; and severe…

    read more…

  • Desire: A Haunting

    Desire: A Haunting

    by Molly Gaudry

    Traumatized by the events of We Take Me Apart, the unlikely heroine of Desire: A Haunting leads a silent life in the cottage that has been in her family since Hester Prynne first bequeathed it to Pearl–whose endearingly cranky spirit remains. So begins this strange friendship between “dog”…

    read more…

  • Everyone Hates Kelsie Miller

    Everyone Hates Kelsie Miller

    by Meredith Ireland

    There’s no one Kelsie Miller hates more than Eric Mulvaney Ortiz—the homecoming king, captain of the football team, and academic archrival in her hyper-competitive prep school. But after Kelsie’s best friend, Briana, moves across the country and stops speaking to her, she’ll do anything, even…

    read more…

  • Everyone Was Falling

    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…

    read more…

  • 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…

    read more…

  • 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…

    read more…

  • 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…

    read more…

  • 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…

    read more…

  • 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…

    read more…

  • Finding Heart Horse: A Memoir of Survival

    Finding Heart Horse: A Memoir of Survival

    by Claire Hitchon (with Janice Harper)

    Have you ever wanted something so badly it was all you could think of? All you could talk about, write about, dream about. Claire did. She wanted a horse. Finding Heart Horse is her journey and her search for her Heart Horse. It takes her…

    read more…

  • 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…

    read more…

  • 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…

    read more…

  • Finding Our Place: 100 Memorable Adoptees, Fostered Persons, and Orphanage Alumni

    Finding Our Place: 100 Memorable Adoptees, Fostered Persons, and Orphanage Alumni

    by Nikki McCaslin with Richard Uhrlaub and Marilyn Grotsky

    This unique one-volume reference guide provides positive and empowering biographical sketches of 100 famous and well-known adoptees throughout time, serving to counter the many negative stereotypes that exist that exist about people who were adopted, fostered, or lived in orphanages. This work looks at the…

    read more…

  • Finding Out: Coming to Terms with Adoption

    Finding Out: Coming to Terms with Adoption

    by Paula Wilson

    Thanks to my wonderful parents, there is a story to be told about an airman and his wife. Those people, who took a chance, went through an arduous process never taken before by an American to open their hearts and home to a two-year-old orphan…

    read more…

  • 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…

    read more…

  • 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…

    read more…

  • 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…

    read more…

  • 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―…

    read more…

  • 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…

    read more…

  • 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…

    read more…

  • From Home to Homeland: What Adoptive Families Need to Know before Making a Return Trip to China

    From Home to Homeland: What Adoptive Families Need to Know before Making a Return Trip to China

    Edited by Debra Jacobs, Iris Chin Ponte, and Leslie Kim Wang

    Every year, hundreds of adoptive families embark on homeland trips to China and other countries. Homeland trips offer great opportunities for helping adopted children develop a coherent narrative that makes sense of their complicated beginnings. Although the trip can be a joyful experience, it can…

    read more…

  • 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…

    read more…