Including More Than 450 Adoptee-Recommended Titles!

Category: Adoptee Author

  • 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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  • Questions Adoptees Are Asking

    Questions Adoptees Are Asking

    by Sherrie Eldridge

    People who have been adopted grow up with many similar questions, thoughts, challenges, and choices, such as, “Does my birth mother ever think about me?” and “What is my real worth? Was I a mistake?” More than 70 adoptees discuss these and other adoption issues…

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  • 20 Life-Transforming Choices Adoptees Need to Make

    20 Life-Transforming Choices Adoptees Need to Make

    by Sherrie Eldridge

    As an adoptee, do you have mixed feelings about your adoption? If you do, you are not alone – adoptees often experience complex feelings of grief, anger, and questions about their identity. Sherrie Eldridge is an adoptee and adoption expert, and in this book she…

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  • Forever Fingerprints: An Amazing Discovery for Adopted Children

    Forever Fingerprints: An Amazing Discovery for Adopted Children

    by Sherrie Eldridge

    Heart-warming and playful, Forever Fingerprints shows how adoptive parents can use a common occurrence–a relative’s pregnancy–as a springboard for discussions about birth parents. Lucie is excited to feel a baby moving in her Aunt Grace’s tummy but it makes her think about her adoption story in…

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  • 20 Things Adoptive Parents Need to Succeed

    20 Things Adoptive Parents Need to Succeed

    by Sherrie Eldridge

    This book is pure encouragement for adoptive parents! Most adoptive parents don’t know that their child has a different “heart language” than theirs. They need a translator, which Sherrie Eldridge becomes in her new book. In her groundbreaking first book, Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their…

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  • Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew

    Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew

    by Sherrie Eldridge

    The voices of adopted children are poignant, questioning. And they tell a familiar story of loss, fear, and hope. This extraordinary book, written by a woman who was adopted herself, gives voice to children’s unspoken concerns, and shows adoptive parents how to free their kids…

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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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  • Outer Search Inner Journey

    Outer Search Inner Journey

    by Peter Dodds

    In this riveting memoir a woman in post World War II Germany relinquishes her infant son Peter to an orphanage where he’s adopted by American parents and brought to the United States. Separated from family of origin and ancestral homeland, Peter grows up alienated in…

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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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  • A Law of Blood-ties: The “Right” to Access Genetic Ancestry

    A Law of Blood-ties: The “Right” to Access Genetic Ancestry

    by Alice Diver

    This text collates and examines the jurisprudence that currently exists in respect of blood-tied genetic connection, arguing that the right to identity often rests upon the ability to identify biological ancestors, which in turn requires an absence of adult-centric veto norms. It looks firstly to…

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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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  • The Goodbye Baby: A Diary about Adoption

    The Goodbye Baby: A Diary about Adoption

    by Elaine Pinkerton

    Anyone who was adopted or who has adopted a child will find The Goodbye Baby a comforting and inspiring read. It takes one on a journey through the thorny issues of adoption, a search for healing, and an inspiring finale. Adoptee Author: Elaine Pinkerton Publication Year: 2012…

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  • Dust of the Streets: The Journey of a Biracial Orphan of the Korean War

    Dust of the Streets: The Journey of a Biracial Orphan of the Korean War

    by Thomas Park Clement

    Autobiography of a half and half Korean boy born in the middle of the Korean War found at age 5 on the streets of Seoul, post war, adopted into the U.S. who eventually grew up to be a medical device inventor with over two dozen…

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  • Jack & Emma’s Adoptee Journey

    Jack & Emma’s Adoptee Journey

    by Pam Kroskie

    Jack & Emma’s Adoptee Journey is a children’s book that will help open the lines of communication between the adoptive parent and the adoptee. The book will also help the adoptees understand themselves and give parents the insight they need. Adoptee Author: Pam Kroskie Publication Year: 2014…

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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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  • 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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  • Miss New York Has Everything

    Miss New York Has Everything

    by Lori Jakiela

    Her aunt was a nun who popped pills and did time in Narcotics Anonymous. Her father grew up during the Depression, believed he’d be the next Frank Sinatra, and ended up working in the mills. His daughter, Lori Jakiela, spent her suburban Pittsburgh childhood watching…

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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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  • Fitting Ends

    Fitting Ends

    by Dan Chaon

    Fitting Ends is the first collection of fiction by the acclaimed author of the National Book Award finalist Among the Missing and now appears in this newly revised edition with two never before collected stories. Written before Among the Missing and originally published by Northwestern University…

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  • Among the Missing

    Among the Missing

    by Dan Chaon

    In this haunting, bracing collection, Dan Chaon shares stories of men, women, and children who live far outside the American Dream, while wondering which decision, which path, or which accident brought them to this place. Chaon mines the psychological landscape of his characters to dazzling…

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  • Stay Awake: Stories

    Stay Awake: Stories

    by Dan Chaon

    Before the critically acclaimed novels Await Your Reply and You Remind Me of Me, Dan Chaon made a name for himself as a renowned writer of dazzling short stories. In these haunting, suspenseful stories, lost, fragile, searching characters wander between ordinary life and a psychological…

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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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  • Nearer Home: A Novel

    Nearer Home: A Novel

    by Joy Castro

    The irresistible, razor-sharp second book in the post-Katrina New Orleans-set crime series featuring unforgettable and gutsy reporter Nola Céspedes Early one morning, Times-Picayune crime reporter Nola Céspedes goes for her regular run in Audubon Park. More than the heat of the dawning New Orleans day, she’s trying…

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  • Hell or High Water: A Novel

    Hell or High Water: A Novel

    by Joy Castro

    Nola Céspedes, an ambitious young reporter at the Times-Picayune, catches a break: An assignment to write her first full-length feature. While researching her story, she also becomes fixated on the search for a missing tourist in New Orleans. As Nola’s work leads her into darker…

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  • My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family’s Nazi Past

    My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family’s Nazi Past

    by Jennifer Teege and Nikola Sellmair (translated by Carolin Sommer)

    This is the extraordinary and moving memoir of a woman who learns that her grandfather was Amon Goeth, the brutal Nazi commandant depicted in Schindler’s List. When Jennifer Teege, a German-Nigerian woman, happened to pluck a library book from the shelf, she had no idea…

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  • Island of Bones: Essays

    Island of Bones: Essays

    by Joy Castro

    What is “identity” when you’re a girl adopted as an infant by a Cuban American family of Jehovah’s Witnesses? The answer isn’t easy. You won’t find it in books. And you certainly won’t find it in the neighborhood. This is just the beginning of Joy…

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  • The Truth Book: A Memoir

    The Truth Book: A Memoir

    by Joy Castro

    Adopted as a baby and raised by a devout Jehovah’s Witness family, Joy Castro is constantly reminded to tell the truth no matter what the consequences. Nevertheless, Castro finds this tenet to be the most violated. Here, in her very own Truth Book, Castro bears…

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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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  • Mum’s the Word!

    Mum’s the Word!

    by Lorna Little

    What happens when you receive a piece of information that changes your life? Mum’s the Word is not just one way to react, but also a 40,000-word memoir that takes you through how the author handled such news. Suspense builds as a story of family…

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  • Indigo: In Search of the Color That Seduced the World

    Indigo: In Search of the Color That Seduced the World

    by Catherine E. McKinley

    Brimming with rich, electrifying tales of the precious dye and its ancient heritage, Indigo is also the story of a personal quest: Catherine McKinley is the descendant of a clan of Scots who wore indigo tartan; Jewish “rag traders”; a Massachusetts textile factory owner; and…

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