Including More Than 450 Adoptee-Recommended Titles!

Books About Search and/or Reunion

  • Becoming Patrick: A Memoir

    Becoming Patrick: A Memoir

    by Patrick McMahon

    When Pat McMahon risks the love of the mother who raised him by seeking out the mother who gave him away, he transforms from a mild-mannered engineer into a frenetic detective. After he overcomes the challenges of existential angst, bureaucratic roadblocks, and unemployment, the phone…

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  • Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe

    Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe

    by Lori Jakiela

    Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe is a book about mapping lives–the lives we are born with and the lives we are allowed to make for ourselves. Belief is part adoption narrative and part meditation on family, motherhood, nature vs. nurture, and what…

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  • Beneath a Tall Tree

    Beneath a Tall Tree

    by Jean Strauss

    Bestselling author Jean Strauss’s memoir about her quest to unearth her past is an incredibly funny and touching journey that redefines the meaning of family and celebrates the universal connections that link us all. Adoptee Author: Jean Strauss Publication Year: 2001 Critical Reviews Adoptee Reviews:  Other Reviews: …

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  • Beyond Two Worlds: A Taiwanese-American Adoptee’s Memoir & Search for Identity

    Beyond Two Worlds: A Taiwanese-American Adoptee’s Memoir & Search for Identity

    by Marijane Huang

    Born in Taipei, Taiwan, Marijane was adopted by an American military family at four months old. She grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in the deep South where hers was the only Asian face among a majority of white. Raised to believe she was Vietnamese…

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  • Billie’s Kid: A True Story About Adoption

    Billie’s Kid: A True Story About Adoption

    by Steve Tucker

    Jazz musician Steve Tucker has always known he was adopted and has spent nearly fifty years tormented by thoughts of who he is, where he came from, and whom he looks like. Like many adoptees, he embarks on a journey of discovery when he goes…

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  • Birthright: The Guide to Search and Reunion for Adoptees, Birthparents, and Adoptive Parents

    Birthright: The Guide to Search and Reunion for Adoptees, Birthparents, and Adoptive Parents

    by Jean A. S. Strauss

    What happens when an adoptee decides to locate a birthparent or a birthparent wants to find a child given up long ago? How does one search for people whose names one does not know? And what happens during a reunion? In 1983, Jean A. S.…

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  • Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption

    Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption

    Susan Devan Harness

    In Bitterroot Susan Devan Harness traces her journey to understand the complexities and struggles of being an American Indian child adopted by a white couple and living in the rural American West. When Harness was fifteen years old, she questioned her adoptive father about her “real” parents.…

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  • Bonded at Birth: An Adoptee’s Search for Her Roots

    Bonded at Birth: An Adoptee’s Search for Her Roots

    by Gloria Oren

    Bonded at Birth: An Adoptee’s Search for Her Roots is a story of loss, survival, determination, and persistence. It covers one state, three countries, and two continents. It covers sixteen years of searching and a little over four decades since her first adoption. After growing…

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  • Braverman (previously titled I Almost Fell Off the Top of the Empire State Building: A True Story of Trauma and Survival

    Braverman (previously titled I Almost Fell Off the Top of the Empire State Building: A True Story of Trauma and Survival

    by Joe Soll with Susan Hawvermale

    From lying on a New Jersey highway with cars speeding by his head in both directions, to being shot in the head by a manic sniper and almost falling to his death from the top of the Empire State Building, Joe Soll’s autobiography details these…

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  • Called Home, Book 2: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects

    Called Home, Book 2: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects

    Edited by Patricia Busbee and Trace A. DeMeyer

    From recent news about Baby Veronica to history like Operation Papoose, this book examines how Native American adoptees and their families experienced adoption and were exposed to the genocidal policies of governments who created Indian adoption projects. The editors Trace A. DeMeyer and Patricia Busbee, both…

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  • 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…

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  • Crazy Bastard: A Memoir of Forced Adoption

    Crazy Bastard: A Memoir of Forced Adoption

    by Abraham Maddison

    Derek Pedley abandons his thirty-year journalism career on the brink of a breakdown, haunted by addiction, compulsion, and obsession, and carrying the heavy baggage of a boy who found his adoption papers at fifteen. When an anguished letter his mother wrote almost half a century…

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  • 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…

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  • 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,…

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  • 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…

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  • Dear Stephen Michael’s Mother: A Memoir

    Dear Stephen Michael’s Mother: A Memoir

    by Kevin Barhydt

    Abandoned by his mother at birth, Kevin was enveloped in a labyrinth of adoption, addiction, and child sexual abuse. By age 20, a shell of the boy he once was, Kevin succumbed completely to a suicidal lifestyle of drug dealing and prostitution. At 45, after…

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  • 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…

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  • Do You Know Who I Am? An Infantryman’s Adoption Story of Finding Family after Fifty

    Do You Know Who I Am? An Infantryman’s Adoption Story of Finding Family after Fifty

    by Christopher E. Harvey

    Infantryman Christopher Harvey’s childhood ended at twelve years old when his mom casually told him that he was adopted. Consequently, adulthood for him began when he met his birth mother after he turned fifty. And he describes the thirty-eight years in between as a purgatory…

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  • 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…

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  • Family Found: The DNA Journey

    Family Found: The DNA Journey

    by Douglas M. Dubrish

    I am grateful being adopted as a toddler and having an early life of mostly fond memories. My adoptive mother had passed, and my adoptive father remarried. I had a good career and a family of my own. But, being adopted nagged at me. I…

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  • 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…

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  • Finding Faith: A Memoirish Novel (The Birth-Fathers’ Club Series)

    Finding Faith: A Memoirish Novel (The Birth-Fathers’ Club Series)

    by Michele Kriegman

    Like a twisting double helix of DNA, these two satisfying stories of compelling and complex father-daughter pairs entwine with life-altering surprises. They bring compassion, humor, and understanding to the question of whether it is ever too late for paternal instinct. Each year thousands of men…

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  • Finding Family: My Search for Roots and the Secrets in My DNA

    Finding Family: My Search for Roots and the Secrets in My DNA

    by Richard Hill

    Finding Family: My Search for Roots and the Secrets in My DNA is the highly suspenseful account of an adoptee trying to reclaim the biological family denied him by sealed birth records. This fascinating quest, including the author’s landmark use of DNA testing, takes readers on an…

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  • 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…

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  • 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…

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  • 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…

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  • 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…

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  • Forbidden Love

    Forbidden Love

    by Lisa Jones Gentry as told by Joe Steele

    Forbidden Love is the true story of Father William Grau, a black Catholic priest, and Sister Sophie Legocki, a white Polish-American nun who, in the segregated fifties, defied the church and society with their passionate secret love affair that lasted for nearly a decade and…

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