Category: LGBT
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Sacrificial Animals: A Novel
by Kailee Pedersen
Inspired by Kailee Pedersen’s own journey being adopted from Nanning, China in 1996 and growing up alongside her family’s farm in Nebraska, this rich and atmospheric supernatural horror debut explores an ancient Chinese mythology. The last thing Nick Morrow expected to receive was an invitation…
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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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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…
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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,…
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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…
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Monstrous: A Transracial Adoption Story
by Sarah Myer
Sarah has always struggled to fit in. Born in South Korea and adopted at birth by a white couple, she grows up in a rural community with few Asian neighbors. People whisper in the supermarket. Classmates bully her. She has trouble containing her anger in…
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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…
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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…
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Reprieve
by James Han Mattson
On April 27, 1997, four contestants make it to the final cell of the Quigley House, a full-contact haunted escape room in Lincoln, Nebraska, made famous for its monstrosities, booby-traps, and ghoulishly costumed actors. If the group can endure these horrors without shouting the safe…
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You’ll Always Be White To Me: A Memoir
by Garon Wade
Three years in to Sri Lanka’s bloody civil war, an abandoned baby ends up in the adopted arms of a white American couple living in a Colombo home that doubles as a CIA safe house. They take him on an extraordinary journey around the globe…
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Saved by a Song: The Art and Healing Power of Songwriting
by Mary Gauthier
Mary Gauthier was twelve years old when she was given her Aunt Jenny’s old guitar and taught herself to play with a Mel Bay basic guitar workbook. Music offered her a window to a world where others felt the way she did. Songs became lifelines…
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Everyone Was Falling
by JS Lee
On the weekend of July Fourth, shots are fired at a twentieth high school reunion in a small US town, killing fifty-six. Three survive. So begins Everyone Was Falling, an empowering novel of friendship and violence on the verge of Trump’s election. Lucy–a queer, Asian…
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The Son with Two Moms
by Tony Hynes
Tony was taken in at the age of three by Mary Hynes and Janet Simons, after being separated from his mother, who suffered from schizophrenia. After that time, he was shuffled in and out of his grandmothers home before being placed in an orphanage, where…
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The Lucky Daughter
by Mariama J. Lockington
Poetry. “Mariama J. Lockington’s The Lucky Daughter digs deep into the physicality of moving through this world as a queer woman of color. These poems – about race, sexuality, families (found, formed, and inherited) – are brutal in their honesty and beauty. “a girl” Lockington…
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The Perks of Being an Adoptee
by Mae Claire
Adoption is complex and each adoption is unique. There is something that unites all adoptees though and it is loss. Many find happiness, joy, understanding, and their birth family while at the same time experiencing great pain. There are also adoptees who have had less…
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Swabbed & Found: An Adopted Man’s DNA Journey to Discover his Family Tree
by Frank Billingsley
As Houston’s beloved KPRC weatherman for more than 20 years, Frank Billingsley seems like a relative to many people. His optimistic presence comes into their homes and reassures that even the gloomiest of rain clouds probably has a silver lining. He has such a way…
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The Collected Plays of Edward Albee: 1978-2003
by Edward Albee
Brings readers up to date with one of the most varied and brilliant periods in the career of a true American master playwright, including his most influential and iconoclastic plays to date. Adoptee Author: Edward Albee Publication Year: 2008 Critical Reviews Adoptee Reviews: Other Reviews: All Bookshop…
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The Collected Plays of Edward Albee: 1966-1977
by Edward Albee
Brings readers up to date with one of the most varied and brilliant periods in the career of a true American master playwright, including his most influential and iconoclastic plays to date. Adoptee Author: Edward Albee Publication Year: 2008 Critical Reviews Adoptee Reviews: Other Reviews: All Bookshop…
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The Collected Plays of Edward Albee: 1958-1965
by Edward Albee
Brings readers up to date with one of the most varied and brilliant periods in the career of a true American master playwright, including his most influential and iconoclastic plays to date. Adoptee Author: Edward Albee Publication Year: 2007 (1st edition) Critical Reviews Adoptee Reviews: Other Reviews: …
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Fumbling Toward Divinity: The Adoption Scriptures
by Craig Hickman
Craig Hickman had had enough of the secrets and cover-ups and lies and was determined to solve the mystery of his roots. An estimated 7 million Americans are adopted. Depending on their age, many were adopted under the secrecy and shame of the closed adoption…
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Letters to My Birthmother: An Adoptee’s Diary of Her Search for Her Identity
by Amy E. Dean
A memoir in unsent letters written by an adoptee and former foster child. Adoptee Author: Amy E. Dean Publication Year: 1991 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…
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In a Country of Mothers
by A. M. Homes
No relationship is more charged than that between a psychotherapist and her patient—unless it is the relationship between a mother and her daughter. This disturbing literary thriller explores what happens when the line between those relationships blurs. Jody Goodman enters psychotherapy with questions of career…
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Things You Should Know: A Collection of Stories
by A. M. Homes
Homes’s distinctive narratives illuminate our dreams and desires, our memories and losses, and our profound need for connection, and demonstrate how extraordinary the ordinary can be. In “Chinese Lesson,” we meet Geordie, a man watching over his wandering, senile mother-in-law by means of an electronic…
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Jack
by A. M. Homes
In Jack, A. M. Homes gives us a teenager who wants nothing more than to be normal—even if being normal means having divorced parents and a rather strange best friend. But when Jack’s father takes him out in a rowboat on Lake Watchmayoyo and tells…
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Music for Torching
by A. M. Homes
As A.M. Homes’s incendiary novel unfolds, the Kodacolor hues of the good life become nearly hallucinogenic. Laying bare the foundations of a marriage, flash frozen in the anxious entropy of a suburban subdivision, Paul and Elaine spin the quit terrors of family life into a…
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The Safety of Objects: Stories
by A. M. Homes
Originally published in 1990 to wide critical acclaim, this extraordinary first collection of stories by A. M. Homes confronts the real and the surreal on even terms to create a disturbing and sometimes hilarious vision of the American dream. Included here are “Adults Alone,” in…
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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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This Book Will Save Your Life
by A. M. Homes
Richard Novak is a modern-day Everyman, a middle-aged divorcé trading stocks out of his home. He has done such a good job getting his life under control that he needs no one—except his trainer, nutritionist, and housekeeper. He is functionally dead and doesn’t even notice…
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May We Be Forgiven
by A. M. Homes
In this vivid, transfixing new novel, A. M. Homes presents a darkly comic look at twenty-first-century domestic life and the possibility of personal transformation. Harold Silver has spent a lifetime watching his more successful younger brother, George, acquire a covetable wife, two kids, and a…
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The Mistress’s Daughter
by A. M. Homes
The acclaimed writer A. M. Homes was given up for adoption before she was born. Her biological mother was a twenty-two-year-old single woman who was having an affair with a much older married man with a family of his own. The Mistress’s Daughter is the…