Including More Than 450 Adoptee-Recommended Titles!

Books About or Written By Female Adoptees

  • Remedies

    Remedies

    by Patricia Cotter-Busbee

    Remedies is a deeply original autobiographical fiction that chronicles the lives of five generations of women. It is beautifully layered and brought to life through image-driven vignettes that have been paired down into razor-sharp scenes. The stories convey tragedy and comedy in equal portions. Wombs…

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  • Requitements

    Requitements

    by Rosemary Starace

    Poems and an essay. Adoptee Author: Rosemary Starace Publication Year: 2015 (revised edition; originally published 2010) 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 Adoptee Reading running whenever items are…

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  • Restored: Pursuing Wholeness When a Relationship Is Broken

    Restored: Pursuing Wholeness When a Relationship Is Broken

    by Deanna Doss Shrodes

    Have your hopes been dashed into pieces when you tried to make a relationship work and the other person didn’t respond as you wished? Have you asked someone to forgive you, but he or she didn’t respond as you desired? Have you prayed for healing…

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  • Reunited: An Investigative Genealogist Unlocks Some of Life’s Greatest Family Mysteries

    Reunited: An Investigative Genealogist Unlocks Some of Life’s Greatest Family Mysteries

    by Pamela Slaton (with Samantha Marshall)

    In this poignant and heartwarming narrative, renowned genealogist Pamela Slaton tells the most striking stories from her incredibly successful career of reconnecting adoptees with long-lost birth parents. After a traumatic reunion with her own birth mother, Pamela Slaton realized two things: That she wanted to…

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  • Ripped at the Root: An Adoption Story

    Ripped at the Root: An Adoption Story

    by Mary Cardaras

    “With searing detail and lean, crisp prose, in Ripped at the Root Mary Cardaras tells the story of Dena Polites, a woman born to a young unwed Greek couple who was adopted by married Greek Americans in Ohio. Polites’s tale serves as a focal point…

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  • Road to Belonging: Establishing a Legacy of Love After Closed Adoption

    Road to Belonging: Establishing a Legacy of Love After Closed Adoption

    by Lynne Leppard

    Each person has their own unique story, and as Lynne Leppard’s early life included foster care and adoption, she often found herself wondering about her origins and heritage. Her loyalty to her adoptive family was real, but so too was her longing to find out…

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  • Rooted in Adoption: A Collection of Adoptee Reflections

    Rooted in Adoption: A Collection of Adoptee Reflections

    by Veronica Breaux and Shelby Kilgore

    Rooted in Adoption: A Collection of Adoptee Reflections is a collection of short narratives from those who have been adopted. Adoptees of various ages, backgrounds, and experiences were asked discuss the joys of adoption and the struggles of living a life of secrecy and lost…

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  • Rose’s Locket

    Rose’s Locket

    by Shannon Quist

    Adopted teenager Izzie grew up with an incomplete story about her past. That is, until her eighteenth birthday, when her parents reveal a set of documents that give Izzie more answers about her origin than she had ever anticipated. Intent on discovering who her birthmother…

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  • Sandwiched: A Memoir of Holding On and Letting Go

    Sandwiched: A Memoir of Holding On and Letting Go

    by Laurie James

    Laurie James spent most of her life wondering what it means to belong; loneliness dictated the choices she made. She rarely shared this secret with others, however; it was always hidden behind a carefree and can-do attitude. When she’s in her mid-forties, Laurie’s mother has…

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  • Santa Fe Blogger: Life After Adoption Recovery

    Santa Fe Blogger: Life After Adoption Recovery

    by Elaine Pinkerton

    Santa Fe Blogger traces an adoptee’s journey to wholeness and authenticity. One blog post at a time, author and blogger Elaine Pinkerton comes to grips with the lack of a family tree and the need to “adopt” who one really is. In 48 blog posts,…

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  • Saved by a Song: The Art and Healing Power of Songwriting

    Saved by a Song: The Art and Healing Power of Songwriting

    by Mary Gauthier

    Mary Gauthier was twelve years old when she was given her Aunt Jenny’s old guitar and taught herself to play with a Mel Bay basic guitar workbook. Music offered her a window to a world where others felt the way she did. Songs became lifelines…

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  • Saving Grace: A Story of Adoption

    Saving Grace: A Story of Adoption

    by L.B. Johnson

    It started with a piece of paper–a birth certificate, sent to the author’s parents long after her birth. There is much history in that piece of paper. For she was born to an unwed mother in the generation prior to Roe v. Wade, on a…

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  • Scoop Baby: . . . It Is Time

    Scoop Baby: . . . It Is Time

    by H.T. Sawyer

    They said her baby died… Baby Scoop Era: Once upon a time, unwed mothers were trained to care for their babies, largely by Christian women. In the 1940’s, however, maternity wards began to gain favor, as did the idea of relinquishing babies to well-meaning strangers.…

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  • Searching for Mom: A Memoir

    Searching for Mom: A Memoir

    by Sara Easterly (with Linda Easterly)

    Searching for Mom is a “disarmingly honest” mother-daughter story. Sara Easterly spent a lifetime looking for the perfect mother. As an adoptee she had difficulties attaching to her mother, struggled with her faith, lived the effects of intergenerational wounding, and felt an inherent sense of being…

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  • Searching for the Castle: Backtrail of an Adoption

    Searching for the Castle: Backtrail of an Adoption

    by Barbara Leigh Ohrstrom

    Like cowboys turning in the saddle to look at where they came from, Searching for the Castle documents the backtrail of author Barbara Leigh Ohrstrom’s adoption. It begins with her urgency as an eighteen-year-old woman initiating her search for her birth parents. Her recollection includes…

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  • Season of Dares

    Season of Dares

    by Leah Silvieus

    Season of Dares leans into fragments of the scriptures, narratives and mythologies of a Korean adoptee’s childhood in the rural American West. Fearlessly, it revisits and explores the physical and spiritual landscapes of those communities and the tensions between the impulses that shaped them–violence and…

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  • Second Choices: A Story of Belonging and Finding Home

    Second Choices: A Story of Belonging and Finding Home

    by June Wright

    Elise, an adoptee, had always felt like a second choice. When she fell in love with and married Evan, she believed she was finally someone’s first choice. She longed for a place to feel validated, loved, and, most importantly, fit in. But Evan had demons…

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  • Secrets, Spies and Spotted Dogs: Unravelling mysterious family connections behind a secret adoption

    Secrets, Spies and Spotted Dogs: Unravelling mysterious family connections behind a secret adoption

    by Jane Eales

    A simple need for her birth certificate leads Jane, aged 19, to a devastating secret: she is adopted. Stunned, Jane is sworn to secrecy and forbidden to search for her biological family – a promise she honours until the death of her adoptive parents. A…

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  • See No Color

    See No Color

    by Shannon Gibney

    Despite some teasing, being a biracial girl adopted by a white family didn’t used to bother Alex much. She was a stellar baseball player, just like her father—her baseball coach and a former pro athlete. All Alex wanted was to play ball forever. But after…

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  • Seoulmates

    Seoulmates

    by Jen Frederick

    When Hara Wilson lands in Seoul to find her birth mother, she doesn’t plan on falling in love with the first man she lays eyes on, but Choi Yujun is irresistible. If his broad shoulders and dimples weren’t enough, Choi Yujun is the most genuine,…

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  • Shadows of a Dark-Alley Adoptee: An Adoptee’s Search for Self

    Shadows of a Dark-Alley Adoptee: An Adoptee’s Search for Self

    by Wendy Barkett

    A book of thoughts and poems from an adoptee who attempts to find the truth which is masked by lies. Her lonely travels through a world that feels dark. At times she finds a friend to ride along in this journey called life. Adoptee Author: Wendy…

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  • She Named You Donna

    She Named You Donna

    by Julie Kerton

    It’s a January morning in 1976; Julie rips the hospital bracelet from her wrist and throws it across the room. As it lands, she doesn’t know that the sound will echo through the years. But the story doesn’t begin here. In a suburb north of…

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  • Silent Voices

    Silent Voices

    by Carlynne Hershberger

    The story of adoption is seldom told from the natural mother’s point of view. Eleven full color paintings with narrative poetry tell a story of loss, longing, power, powerlessness, surrender, grief, family and meaning. It represents the spiritual and physical connection that women have with…

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  • Sleeps with Knives

    Sleeps with Knives

    by Laramie Harlow

    Utterly raw, painfully true poems about adoption, child abuse, life in Wisconsin and Native American history. The poetry collection includes song lyrics from the author’s time as a musician. This is Laramie Harlow’s (Tsalgi-Shawnee-Euro) first chapbook. Adoptee Author: Laramie Harlow (aka Trace A. DeMeyer, Lara Trace…

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  • Some Girls: My Life in a Harem

    Some Girls: My Life in a Harem

    by Jillian Lauren

    At eighteen, Jillian Lauren was an NYU theater school dropout with a tip about an upcoming audition. The “casting director” told her that a rich businessman in Singapore would pay pretty American girls $20,000 if they stayed for two weeks to spice up his parties.…

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  • Somebody Else’s Daughter

    Somebody Else’s Daughter

    by Elizabeth Brundage

    In the idyllic Berkshires, at the prestigious Pioneer School, there are dark secrets that threaten to come to light. Willa Golding, a student, has been brought up by her adoptive parents in elegant prosperity, but they have fled a mysterious and shameful past. Her biological…

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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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  • Somewhere Sisters: A Story of Adoption, Identity, and the Meaning of Family

    Somewhere Sisters: A Story of Adoption, Identity, and the Meaning of Family

    by Erika Hayasaki

    An incredible, deeply reported story of identical twins Isabella and Hà, born in Viêt Nam and raised on opposite sides of the world, each knowing little about the other’s existence until they were reunited as teenagers, against all odds. It was 1998 in Nha Trang,…

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