Including More Than 450 Adoptee-Recommended Titles!

Books About or Written By Female Adoptees

  • No Returns Without Original Receipt

    No Returns Without Original Receipt

    by Diane McConnell

    Renewed courage after learning the final piece of my true heritage has overcome my life-long fear of telling my story. Every adoptee has the right, and many the need, to discover her or his true history, ancestry and identity. Knowledge gives power and confidence. With…

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  • NoBODY Looks Like Me: An Adoptee Experience

    NoBODY Looks Like Me: An Adoptee Experience

    by Lora K. Joy; illustrated by Laura Foote

    NoBODY Looks Like Me represents what it is like for an adoptee to grow up in a family where they are not genetically related to anyone. There is a longing to know where your eyes, nose and hands come from. When an adoptee decides to…

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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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  • Not Nicholson: The Story of a First Daughter, An Adoption Search and Reunion Memoir

    Not Nicholson: The Story of a First Daughter, An Adoption Search and Reunion Memoir

    by Ann M. Haralambie

    This is a story about family, adoption, heritage, and identity. It is also about place and people. Haralambie invites you to accompany her on her search for her biological roots, the hurdles and misdirections, and what happens when she finally finds out who her biological…

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  • Ohpikiihaakan-ohpihmeh (Raised Somewhere Else): A ’60s Scoop Adoptee’s Story of Coming Home

    Ohpikiihaakan-ohpihmeh (Raised Somewhere Else): A ’60s Scoop Adoptee’s Story of Coming Home

    by Colleen Cardinal

    During the Sixties Scoop, over 20,000 Indigenous children in Canada were removed from their biological families, lands, and culture and trafficked across provinces, borders, and overseas to be raised in non-Indigenous households. Ohpikiihaakan-ohpihmeh delves into the personal and provocative narrative of Colleen Cardinal’s journey growing…

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  • Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related.: A Memoir

    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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  • Omma, Sea of Joy and Other Astrological Signs

    Omma, Sea of Joy and Other Astrological Signs

    by Bo Schwabacher

    This remarkable book illuminates Schwabacher’s adopted Korean experience: trauma, discovery, reassemblage. She is brave enough to not flinch at the dark parts and talented enough to render them into a gorgeous, singular art. The anti-fairy tale has been made new. It is a splayed open…

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  • One Small Sacrifice: A Memoir (Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects)

    One Small Sacrifice: A Memoir (Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects)

    by Trace A. DeMeyer

    Award-winning Native American journalist Trace A. DeMeyer has published her updated memoir One Small Sacrifice: A Memoir (Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects), an exposé on generations of American Indian children adopted by non-Indian families. Known for her exceptional print interviews with famous Native…

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  • Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

    Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

    by Jeanette Winterson

    Winner of the Whitbread Prize for best first fiction, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a coming-out novel from Winterson, the acclaimed author of The Passion and Sexing the Cherry. The narrator, Jeanette, cuts her teeth on the knowledge that she is one of…

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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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  • Out of Place: The Lives of Korean Adoptee Immigrants

    Out of Place: The Lives of Korean Adoptee Immigrants

    by SunAh M. Laybourn

    Since the early 1950s, over 125,000 Korean children have been adopted in the United States, primarily by white families. Korean adoptees figure in twenty-five percent of US transnational adoptions and are the largest group of transracial adoptees currently in adulthood. Despite being legally adopted, Korean…

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  • Out of the Birdcage: Memoirs of an Adoptee

    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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  • Out of the Fog: Poems of Nature, Nurture and Imagination

    Out of the Fog: Poems of Nature, Nurture and Imagination

    Jill Uchiyama

    Using evocative language and powerful emotion, Jill Uchiyama’s poems expose the creative interior of an adopted girl, from infancy to middle age. Through them, we discover the rare and often unknown thoughts, dreams, and imagination of the adoptee forced to adapt to a new family…

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  • Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption

    Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption

    Edited by Jane Jeong Trenka, Julia Chinyere Oparah, and Sun Yung Shin

    Many adoptees are required to become people that they were never meant to be. While transracial adoption tends to be considered benevolent, it often exacts a heavy emotional, cultural, and economic toll on those who directly experience it. Outsiders Within is a landmark publication that carefully…

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  • Overwhelmed by God’s Grace: Uncovering the Truth About Adoption

    Overwhelmed by God’s Grace: Uncovering the Truth About Adoption

    by Margaret Etcher Theriault

    Margaret always knew she was adopted. She was told she was “chosen” and “special” but she always wondered why her roots needed to be such a big secret. When the truth finally came out, the struggle for acceptance and belonging intensified. But then there came healing…

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  • Palimpsest: Documents From a Korean Adoption

    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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  • Paper Pavilion

    Paper Pavilion

    by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs

    Winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Paper Pavilion captures the theme of transnational adoption and a powerful search for a personal history and identity from Korea to America. Adoptee Author: Jennifer Kwon Dobbs Publication Year: 2007 Critical Reviews Adoptee Reviews:  Other Reviews:  All Bookshop and Amazon…

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  • Parenting As Adoptees

    Parenting As Adoptees

    Edited by Adam Chau and Kevin Ost-Vollmers

    Through fourteen chapters, the authors of Parenting As Adoptees give readers a glimpse into a pivotal phase in life that touches the experiences of many domestic and international adoptees–that of parenting. The authors, who are all adoptees from various walks of life, intertwine their personal…

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  • Permanent Home: A Memoir

    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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  • Perpetual Child: Dismantling the Stereotype

    Perpetual Child: Dismantling the Stereotype

    Edited by Diane René Christian and Amanda H.L. Transue-Woolston

    A collection of stories, poems, and essays aimed at confronting the “perpetual child” stereotype faced by adult adoptees. The pieces contained within this anthology implore readers to look deeply into their own ideas about what it means to be adopted and to empathize with the…

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  • Planted by Love: Beauty for Ashes Through Finding My Birth Mother

    Planted by Love: Beauty for Ashes Through Finding My Birth Mother

    by Linda S. Congdon

    When I was a small child in the early 1950’s, my adoptive parents read me a story book about a mother and father going to a special place and choosing a child to become part of their family. The emphasis of this story conveyed that…

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  • Practically Still a Virgin: An Adoption Memoir

    Practically Still a Virgin: An Adoption Memoir

    by Monica Hall

    During Alaska’s rough-and-tumble 1970s oil boom, a time when prostitution, violence, and lawlessness reigned, Monica Hall rebels against her strict Catholic parents in a downward spiral of delinquency. Overwhelmed by guilt and shame when the unthinkable happens, Hall is forced to make impossible choices. Will…

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  • Prison Baby: A Memoir

    Prison Baby: A Memoir

    by Deborah Jiang-Stein

    Even at twelve years old Deborah Jiang-Stein, the adopted daughter of a progressive Jewish couple in Seattle, felt like an outsider. Her multiracial features set her apart from her well-intentioned white parents, who evaded questions about her past. But when Deborah discovered a letter revealing…

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  • Probably Ruby

    Probably Ruby

    by Lisa Bird-Wilson

    This is the story of a woman in search of herself, in every sense. When we first meet Ruby, a Métis woman in her thirties, her life is spinning out of control. She’s angling to sleep with her counselor while also rekindling an old relationship…

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  • Pulled by the Root: An Adoptee’s Healing Journey From Trauma, Shame, and Loss

    Pulled by the Root: An Adoptee’s Healing Journey From Trauma, Shame, and Loss

    by Heidi Marble and Alysa Zalma MD

    Adoption involves complex trauma that, if unhealed and unheard, will pulse through subsequent generations. Pulled by the Root is a raw, vivid, and cinematic account of Heidi Marble’s lived experience as an adopted person. The story is led by Heidi as she pieces together her…

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  • R.A.W.

    R.A.W.

    by Patience Agbabi

    First poetry collection by UK poet Patience Agbabi. Portions of the collection are reportedly autobiographical. Adoptee Author: Patience Agbabi Publication Year: 1995 Critical Reviews Adoptee Reviews:  Other Reviews:  All Bookshop and Amazon links on this site are affiliate links. We earn a small commission to help keep…

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  • Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama

    Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama

    by Marianne Novy

    Explores the ways in which novels and plays portray adoption, probing the cultural fictions that these literary representations have perpetuated. Through careful readings of works by Sophocles, Shakespeare, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Barbara Kingsolver, Edward Albee and others, Marianne Novy reveals how fiction has contributed…

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  • Red Dust Road

    Red Dust Road

    by Jackie Kay

    From the moment when, as a little girl, she realizes that her skin is a different colour from that of her beloved mum and dad, to the tracing and finding of her birth parents, her Highland mother and Nigerian father, Jackie Kay’s journey in Red…

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