Including More Than 450 Adoptee-Recommended Titles!

Books About or Written By Female Adoptees

  • Songs of My Families: A Thirty-Seven-Year Odyssey from Korea to America and Back

    Songs of My Families: A Thirty-Seven-Year Odyssey from Korea to America and Back

    by Kelly Fern with Brad Fern

    In 1971, Lee Myonghi, aged five, was taken from her family and placed in a Korean orphanage. Six months later, she was flown to the United States, where she and two other Korean girls were adopted by a Minnesota couple. They renamed her Kelly Jean.…

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  • Sorry to Disrupt the Peace

    Sorry to Disrupt the Peace

    by Patrick Cottrell

    Helen Moran is thirty-two years old, single, childless, college-educated, and partially employed as a guardian of troubled young people in New York. She’s accepting a delivery from IKEA in her shared studio apartment when her uncle calls to break the news: Helen’s adoptive brother is…

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  • Spare the Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America

    Spare the Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America

    by Stacey Patton

    Why do so many African Americans have such a special attachment to whupping children? Studies show that nearly 80 percent of black parents see spanking, popping, pinching, and beating as reasonable, effective ways to teach respect and to protect black children from the streets, incarceration,…

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  • Split at the Root: A Memoir of Love and Lost Identity

    Split at the Root: A Memoir of Love and Lost Identity

    by Catana Tully

    In this memoir, the author explores questions of race, adoption, and identity, not as the professor of cultural studies she became, but as the Black child of German settlers in Guatemala. Her journey into the mystery that shrouded her early years begins in the US…

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  • Spot the Terrorist!

    Spot the Terrorist!

    by Lori Jakiela

    Lori Jakiela’s Spot the Terrorist! takes the reader on flights through the ordinary-turned-extraordinary, where the everyday experiences of a flight attendant become something much stranger and wilder. Adoptee Author: Lori Jakiela Publication Year: 2012 Critical Reviews Adoptee Reviews:  Other Reviews:  All Bookshop and Amazon links on this…

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  • Star of the Week: A Story of Love, Adoption, and Brownies with Sprinkles

    Star of the Week: A Story of Love, Adoption, and Brownies with Sprinkles

    by Darlene Friedman

    It’s Cassidy-Li’s turn to be Star of the Week at school! So she’s making brownies and collecting photos for her poster. She has pictures of all the important people in her life—with one big exception. Cassidy-Li, adopted from China when she was a baby, doesn’t…

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  • Survival Without Roots: Memoir of an Adopted Englishwoman (Book 1)

    Survival Without Roots: Memoir of an Adopted Englishwoman (Book 1)

    by Anna Anderson

    The Survival Without Roots memoir trilogy portrays the melting pot of emotions experienced by many adoptees associated with their lack of identity, as they spend a lifetime wondering … “Is there anyone out there who looks like me, talks like me and thinks like me?” As an…

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  • Surviving Secrets

    Surviving Secrets

    by Margaret Watson

    A true story that reveals the strength and resilience of the human spirit in the face of betrayal, grief and loss. At age forty, Margaret Watson learned she was adopted. This shocking and confronting truth was previously unknown to her and turned her whole world…

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  • Surviving the White Gaze: A Memoir

    Surviving the White Gaze: A Memoir

    by Rebecca Carroll

    Rebecca Carroll grew up the only black person in her rural New Hampshire town. Adopted at birth by artistic parents who believed in peace, love, and zero population growth, her early childhood was loving and idyllic—and yet she couldn’t articulate the deep sense of isolation…

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  • Taken at Birth: Stolen Babies, Hidden Lies, and My Journey to Finding Home

    Taken at Birth: Stolen Babies, Hidden Lies, and My Journey to Finding Home

    by Jane Blasio

    From the 1940s through the 1960s, young pregnant women entered the front door of a clinic in a small North Georgia town. Sometimes their babies exited out the back, sold to northern couples who were desperate to hold a newborn in their arms. But these…

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  • Taking Down the Wall

    Taking Down the Wall

    by Christine Murphy

    To find a solution, a person must first admit there is a problem. Taking Down the Wall is a chronicle of one woman’s journey to the painful and reluctant admission that there is indeed a problem, her refusal to let an old wound heal. The…

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  • Taking Flight: From War Orphan to Star Ballerina

    Taking Flight: From War Orphan to Star Ballerina

    by Michaela DePrince with Elaine DePrince

    Michaela DePrince was known as girl Number 27 at the orphanage, where she was abandoned at a young age and tormented as a “devil child” for a skin condition that makes her skin appear spotted. But it was at the orphanage that Michaela would find…

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  • Tapioca Fire

    Tapioca Fire

    by Suzanne Gilbert

    Tapioca Fire opens when Susan tries to solve the mystery of a missing parent only to uncover a greater crime. Susan Piper was adopted years ago in Thailand. A once-in-a-lifetime career opportunity brings her to Japan for the opening of a new museum. It also gives…

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  • Telling Tales

    Telling Tales

    by Patience Agbabi

    In Telling Tales, award-winning poet Patience Agbabi presents an inspired 21st-century remix of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, retelling all of the stories, from the Miller’s Tale to the Wife of Bath’s, in her own critically acclaimed poetic style. Celebrating Chaucer’s Middle-English masterwork for its performance element…

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  • Ten Thousand Sorrows

    Ten Thousand Sorrows

    by Elizabeth Kim

    “I don’t know how old I was when I watched my mother’s murder, nor do I know how old I am today.” The illegitimate daughter of a peasant and an American GI, Elizabeth Kim spent her early years as a social outcast in her village…

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  • Thank God I Was Adopted ‘Cause DNA Is No Joke!

    Thank God I Was Adopted ‘Cause DNA Is No Joke!

    by Pekitta Tynes with Janice Young

    Abandoned in a shot house and left without a birth certificate, I was an UNKNOWN. I lived in foster care and later adopted into a wonderful family. After 35-years of searching, I found my biological family through DNA testing. This book is an inspirational journey…

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  • That Mean Old Yesterday: A Memoir

    That Mean Old Yesterday: A Memoir

    by Stacey Patton

    An astonishing coming-of-age memoir by a young woman who survived the foster care system to become an award-winning journalist.  On a rainy night in November 1999, a shoeless Stacey Patton, promising student at NYU, approached her adoptive parents’ house with a gun in her hand.…

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  • The “Unknown” Culture Club: Korean Adoptees, Then and Now

    The “Unknown” Culture Club: Korean Adoptees, Then and Now

    Edited by Janine Myung Ja, Jenette Moon Ja, and Katherine Kim

    This collection serves as a tribute to transracially adopted people sent all over the world. If you were adopted, you are not alone. This book validates the experiences of anyone who has been ridiculed or outright abused, but have found the will to survive, thrive…

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  • The Adoptee Survival Guide: Adoptees Share Their Wisdom and Tools

    The Adoptee Survival Guide: Adoptees Share Their Wisdom and Tools

    Edited by Lynn Grubb

    Thirty adoptee authors provide support, encouragement, and understanding to other adoptees in facing the complexities of being adopted, embarking on search and reunion, fighting for equal access to identifying information, navigating complex family relationships with the latest technology, and surviving it all with a sense…

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  • The Adoption Papers

    The Adoption Papers

    by Jackie Kay

    Jackie Kay tells the story of a black girl’s adoption by a white Scottish couple- from three different viewpoints: the mother, the birth mother, and the daughter. Adoptee Author: Jackie Kay Publication Year: 1991 Critical Reviews Adoptee Reviews:  Other Reviews:  All Bookshop and Amazon links on this…

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  • The Adoption Reunion Survival Guide: Preparing Yourself for the Search, Reunion, and Beyond

    The Adoption Reunion Survival Guide: Preparing Yourself for the Search, Reunion, and Beyond

    by Julie Jarrell Bailey and Lynn N. Giddens, M.A.

    This book is written by two adoption specialists, one of whom is a reunited birthmother, and draws on the real-life experiences of others to help readers prepare for the emotional turbulence of the reunion experience, examine their fantasies and emotions about it, and find a…

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  • The Book of Sarahs: A Family in Parts

    The Book of Sarahs: A Family in Parts

    by Catherine E. McKinley

    Catherine McKinley was one of only a few thousand African American and bi-racial children adopted by white couples in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Raised in a small, white New England town, she had a persistent longing for the more diverse community that would…

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  • The Bridge to Take When Things Get Serious

    The Bridge to Take When Things Get Serious

    by Lori Jakiela

    Her 70-year-old, cancer-stricken mother kills snakes with a broom. Her best friend believes in psychics and the Virgin Mary. Her new neighbor steals her CDs and her aunt sneaks cheese curls into the house. After seven years in New York, Lori Jakiela gives up her…

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  • The Declassified Adoptee: Essays of an Adoption Activist

    The Declassified Adoptee: Essays of an Adoption Activist

    by Amanda H.L. Transue-Woolston; edited by Julie Stromberg

    Throughout this book, readers bear witness to key moments in the unfolding of an adoptee from a quiet, contemplative young woman to an outspoken advocate for the rights of adoptees and their loved ones. By addressing adoption through brief essays, the book provides an avenue through…

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  • The End of Alice

    The End of Alice

    by A. M. Homes

    Here is the incredible story of an imprisoned pedophile who is drawn into an erotically charged correspondence with a nineteen-year-old suburban coed. As the two reveal–and revel in–their obsessive desires, Homes creates in The End of Alice a novel that is part romance, part horror…

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  • The English American: A Novel

    The English American: A Novel

    by Alison Larkin

    When Pippa Dunn,adopted as an infant and raised terribly British, discovers that her birth parents are from the American South, she finds that “culture clash” has layers of meaning she’d never imagined. Meet The English American, a fabulously funny, deeply poignant debut novel that sprang…

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  • The Family of Adoption: Completely Revised and Updated

    The Family of Adoption: Completely Revised and Updated

    by Joyce Maguire Pavao

    Full of wonderful stories that give insight into a wide variety of adoption issues, now revised in light of recent developments, The Family of Adoption is a powerful argument for the right kind of openness in adoption. Joyce Maguire Pavao uses her thirty years of…

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  • The Fifth and Final Name: Memoir of an American Churchill

    The Fifth and Final Name: Memoir of an American Churchill

    by Rhonda Noonan

    In a family memoir that reads like a detective novel, Rhonda Noonan recounts her thirty-year quest to find the truth of her own background–and what she uncovered will surprise readers as much as it did her. Rhonda was born and adopted in Oklahoma, a state…

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