Including More Than 450 Adoptee-Recommended Titles!

Books about Intercountry Adoptions from Africa

  • Ballerina Dreams: From Orphan to Dancer (Step Into Reading, Step 4)

    Ballerina Dreams: From Orphan to Dancer (Step Into Reading, Step 4)

    by Michaela DePrince and Elaine DePrince

    At the age of three, Michaela DePrince found a photo of a ballerina that changed her life. She was living in an orphanage in Sierra Leone at the time, but was soon adopted by a family and brought to America. Michaela never forgot the photo…

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  • Black Anthology: Adult Adoptees Claim Their Space

    Black Anthology: Adult Adoptees Claim Their Space

    Edited by Susan Harris O’Connor, MSW; Diane René Christian; Mei-Mei Akwai Ellerman, PhD

    People who identify as Black adoptees are vaguely known within both adoption circles as well as universal discussions. We are just beginning to be introduced to one another. This anthology allows for the opportunity to see the rich diversity of a people; the uniqueness within…

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  • 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…

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  • Going Unarmed Into the Wail

    Going Unarmed Into the Wail

    by Karen Wangare Leonard

    Going Unarmed Into the Wail is an intense, intimate chapbook that wrestles with what it is to be a product of the adoption-industrial complex. With rich visuals, the poems in this chapbook create space that leaves room to interrogate relationships with historic and present systemic violence,…

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  • Killing Karoline

    Killing Karoline

    by Sara-Jayne King

    Born Karoline King in 1980 in Johannesburg South Africa, Sara-Jayne (as she will later be called by her adoptive parents) is the result of an affair, illegal under apartheid’s Immorality Act, between a white British woman and her black South African employee.Her story reveals the…

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  • Lions Roaring Far From Home: An Anthology by Ethiopian Adoptees

    Lions Roaring Far From Home: An Anthology by Ethiopian Adoptees

    Edited by Aselefech Evans, Kassaye Berhanu-MacDonald, and Maureen McCauley

    Lions Roaring Far From Home: An Anthology by Ethiopian Adoptees includes the essays and poems of 33 writers, ages 8 to over 50, raised in six countries (the US, Canada, Sweden, France, the Netherlands, and Australia). It is the first ever anthology by Ethiopian adoptees. This…

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  • My Fathers’ Daughter: A Story of Family and Belonging

    My Fathers’ Daughter: A Story of Family and Belonging

    by Hannah Pool

    What do you wear to meet your father for the first time? In 2004, Hannah Pool knew more about next season’s lipstick colors than she did about Africa: a beauty editor for The Guardian newspaper, she juggled lattes and cocktails, handbags and hangouts through her…

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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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  • 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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  • 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 Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption

    The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption

    by Kathryn Joyce

    Adoption has long been enmeshed in the politics of reproductive rights, pitched as a “win-win” compromise in the never-ending abortion debate. But as Kathryn Joyce makes clear in The Child Catchers, adoption has lately become even more entangled in the conservative Christian agenda. The Child…

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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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