Including More Than 450 Adoptee-Recommended Titles!

Category: Domestic US

  • What They Never Told Us: True Stories of Family Secrets and Hidden Identities Revealed

    What They Never Told Us: True Stories of Family Secrets and Hidden Identities Revealed

    by Gail Lukasik

    What They Never Told Us tells the stories of ordinary people who made extraordinary, life-changing discoveries about their parentage and/or race and ethnicity that fractured their identities. The book asks the big questions: Who are we? And what is family? Blending social history and personal narratives,…

    read more…

  • The Violence of Love: Race, Family, and Adoption in the United States

    The Violence of Love: Race, Family, and Adoption in the United States

    by Kit W. Myers

    The Violence of Love challenges the narrative that adoption is a solely loving act that benefits birth parents, adopted individuals, and adoptive parents–a narrative that is especially pervasive with transracial and transnational adoptions. Using interdisciplinary methods of archival, legal, and discursive analysis, Kit W. Myers comparatively…

    read more…

  • Pulled by the Root: An Adoptee’s Healing Journey From Trauma, Shame, and Loss

    Pulled by the Root: An Adoptee’s Healing Journey From Trauma, Shame, and Loss

    by Heidi Marble and Alysa Zalma MD

    Adoption involves complex trauma that, if unhealed and unheard, will pulse through subsequent generations. Pulled by the Root is a raw, vivid, and cinematic account of Heidi Marble’s lived experience as an adopted person. The story is led by Heidi as she pieces together her…

    read more…

  • 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…

    read more…

  • Mirrors Made of Ink

    Mirrors Made of Ink

    by Shannon Quist

    A collection of sixty poems spanning moments across a lifetime, Mirrors Made of Ink focuses on the emotional catastrophe of adoption. Quist muses with varied style on family, existence, and the liminal space between two lives in pieces that narrate a lonely path of discovery amidst a…

    read more…

  • Who Is a Worthy Mother?: An Intimate History of Adoption

    Who Is a Worthy Mother?: An Intimate History of Adoption

    by Rebecca Wellington

    Nearly every person in the United States is affected by adoption. Adoption practices are woven into the fabric of American society and reflect how our nation values human beings, particularly mothers. In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed…

    read more…

  • Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood

    Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood

    by Gretchen Sisson

    Adoption has always been viewed as a beloved institution for building families, as well as a mutually agreeable common ground in the abortion debate, but little attention has been paid to the lives of mothers who relinquish infants for private adoption. Relinquished reveals adoption to be a…

    read more…

  • 45 Days of Pushing Through: A Guided Journal

    45 Days of Pushing Through: A Guided Journal

    by Melissa A. Corrigan

    Are you ready for a change? Like really ready? Have you battled low self-esteem, poor internal dialogue, remnants of a traumatic childhood, abusive relationship, or simply feeling a bit… lost? You have the key to unlocking a better you… right inside yourself. In your heart, your mind,…

    read more…

  • Adoption Unfiltered: Revelations from Adoptees, Birth Parents, Adoptive Parents, and Allies

    Adoption Unfiltered: Revelations from Adoptees, Birth Parents, Adoptive Parents, and Allies

    by Sara Easterly, Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, and Lori Holden

    Adoption Unfiltered authors Sara Easterly (adoptee), Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard (birth parent), and Lori Holden (adoptive parent) interview dozens of adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, social workers, therapists, and other allies–all sharing candidly about the challenges in adoption. While finding common ground in the sometimes-contentious…

    read more…

  • The Killing Closet: A Memoir

    The Killing Closet: A Memoir

    by V. L. Brunskill

    In this heartbreaking story of family, struggle, hope, and forgiveness, V.L. Brunskill tells of her life as she grows up on Long Island, New York. Vicki-lynn and her brother Peter are adopted as infants into a family defined by violence. V.L. defends her mother and…

    read more…

  • Adoption Fantasies: The Fetishization of Asian Adoptees from Girlhood to Womanhood

    Adoption Fantasies: The Fetishization of Asian Adoptees from Girlhood to Womanhood

    by Kimberly D. McKee

    In Adoption Fantasies, Kimberly D. McKee explores the ways adopted Asian women and girls are situated at a nexus of objectifications—as adoptees and as Asian American women—and how they negotiate competing expectations based on sensationalist and fictional portrayals of adoption found in US popular culture. McKee…

    read more…

  • A Moment in Time

    A Moment in Time

    by A J Bialo

    Imagine, if you can, if you could trace your beginnings to a specific moment in time. If that specific moment had never happened, your existence–and everything and everybody you have influenced–would never have happened. This is the focus of the title poem in A Moment…

    read more…

  • I Would Meet You Anywhere: A Memoir

    I Would Meet You Anywhere: A Memoir

    by Susan Kiyo Ito

    Growing up with adoptive nisei parents, Susan Kiyo Ito knew only that her birth mother was Japanese American and her father white. But finding and meeting her birth mother in her early twenties was only the beginning of her search for answers, history, and identity.…

    read more…

  • Surrounding Sparky: A Gift of Life

    Surrounding Sparky: A Gift of Life

    by Brad Livingood

    The story of one man’s journey to unearth his roots while navigating the complexities of a 1950s adoption, told through the backdrop of American history, raising a young family, and the advent of social media and modern DNA testing. Serendipitous twists and turns are all…

    read more…

  • Mystic Masquerade: An Adoptee’s Search for Truth

    Mystic Masquerade: An Adoptee’s Search for Truth

    by Valerie Naiman

    Mystic Masquerade: An Adoptee’s Search for Truth is an epic story of adoption that weaves together DNA, ancient wisdom, esoteric knowledge and suppressed information about humanity’s origins. Adopted at birth in Miami, Valerie Naiman healed the trauma of infant separation by embarking on a spiritual…

    read more…

  • When We Become Ours: A YA Adoptee Anthology

    When We Become Ours: A YA Adoptee Anthology

    Edited by Shannon Gibney and Nicole Chung

    There is no universal adoption experience, and no two adoptees have the same story. This anthology for teens edited by Shannon Gibney and Nicole Chung contains a wide range of powerful, poignant, and evocative stories in a variety of genres. These tales from fifteen bestselling,…

    read more…

  • Recycled: A Reluctant Search for True Self Through Nurture, Nature, and Free Will

    Recycled: A Reluctant Search for True Self Through Nurture, Nature, and Free Will

    by Jack F. Rocco MD

    Jack Rocco was a baby when he was adopted by a blue-collar, Italian American family. Today a successful orthopedic surgeon, Jack’s identity was built around his Italian heritage and while he knew the story of his “Gotday,” he didn’t know the story of his birth…

    read more…

  • Not Nicholson: The Story of a First Daughter, An Adoption Search and Reunion Memoir

    Not Nicholson: The Story of a First Daughter, An Adoption Search and Reunion Memoir

    by Ann M. Haralambie

    This is a story about family, adoption, heritage, and identity. It is also about place and people. Haralambie invites you to accompany her on her search for her biological roots, the hurdles and misdirections, and what happens when she finally finds out who her biological…

    read more…

  • A Fire Is Coming

    A Fire Is Coming

    by Emma Stevens

    The true story of when Emma Stevens learned her new next-door neighbor was a psychologist, she innocently asked about how to find a therapist for her own issues. Dr. Carol Brenner decided to accept her as a patient. Against a backdrop of the Laguna Beach…

    read more…

  • Found: Adopted Friends Search for their Birth Families

    Found: Adopted Friends Search for their Birth Families

    by Trish Diggins and Sherri Craig-Evans

    Lifelong friends–both adoptees–decided they would take a chance and search for their birth parents using online DNA kits and social media. It turns out, that was the easy part. What happened over the next five years was much more difficult–trying to forge relationships with a…

    read more…

  • Sanctuaries

    Sanctuaries

    by Vince Sgambati

    Gianni, a gay adoptee, comes of age in a time when adoption and same-sex love are not easily discussed or accepted. Sanctuaries is a tender story of love and healing, set against the larger turmoil of the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, Stonewall, and the…

    read more…

  • You Should Be Grateful: Stories of Race, Identity, and Transracial Adoption

    You Should Be Grateful: Stories of Race, Identity, and Transracial Adoption

    by Angela Tucker

    Angela Tucker is a Black woman, adopted from foster care by white parents. She has heard this microaggression her entire life, usually from well-intentioned strangers who view her adoptive parents as noble saviors. She is grateful for many aspects of her life, but being transracially…

    read more…

  • A Living Remedy: A Memoir

    A Living Remedy: A Memoir

    by Nicole Chung

    Nicole Chung couldn’t hightail it out of her overwhelmingly white Oregon hometown fast enough. As a scholarship student at a private university on the East Coast, no longer the only Korean she knew, she found community and a path to the life she’d long wanted.…

    read more…

  • We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America

    We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America

    by Roxanna Asgarian

    The shocking, deeply reported story of a murder-suicide that claimed the lives of six children–and a searing indictment of the American foster care system. On March 26, 2018, rescue workers discovered a crumpled SUV and the bodies of two women and multiple children at the…

    read more…

  • 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…

    read more…

  • Planted by Love: Beauty for Ashes Through Finding My Birth Mother

    Planted by Love: Beauty for Ashes Through Finding My Birth Mother

    by Linda S. Congdon

    When I was a small child in the early 1950’s, my adoptive parents read me a story book about a mother and father going to a special place and choosing a child to become part of their family. The emphasis of this story conveyed that…

    read more…

  • The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be: A Speculative Memoir of Transracial Adoption

    The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be: A Speculative Memoir of Transracial Adoption

    by Shannon Gibney

    Part memoir, part speculative fiction, this novel explores the often surreal experience of growing up as a mixed-Black transracial adoptee. Dream Country author Shannon Gibney returns with a new book woven from her true story of growing up as the adopted Black daughter of white parents…

    read more…

  • Out of the Fog: Poems of Nature, Nurture and Imagination

    Out of the Fog: Poems of Nature, Nurture and Imagination

    Jill Uchiyama

    Using evocative language and powerful emotion, Jill Uchiyama’s poems expose the creative interior of an adopted girl, from infancy to middle age. Through them, we discover the rare and often unknown thoughts, dreams, and imagination of the adoptee forced to adapt to a new family…

    read more…

  • Jules Fae: A Story of Adoption and Reunion

    Jules Fae: A Story of Adoption and Reunion

    by Terrie Novak

    First mother, teenage Claire Jordan, enters college in 1965. Intending to be Nebraska’s Ideal Coed, she discovers she’s pregnant just weeks into her freshman year. Expelled from school and disowned by her family, Claire turns to Child Horizons adoption agency. They’ll help her and the…

    read more…

  • Person, Perceived Girl

    Person, Perceived Girl

    by A. A. Vincent

    Person, Perceived Girl is poetry collection that explores Blackness–specifically queer, Midwestern, disabled, and transracially adopted Blackness. Poems in this manuscript explore identity, lineage, and body. Adoptee Author: A. A. Vincent Publication Year: 2022 Critical Reviews: Adoptee Reviews:  Other Reviews:  All Bookshop and Amazon links on…

    read more…