Including More Than 450 Adoptee-Recommended Titles!

Category: Search/Reunion

  • Lucky Bastard

    Lucky Bastard

    by Anthony Akerman

    When he was ten years old, the author was told he’d been adopted. It was a seismic event that turned his world upside down. Nobody was who he thought they were. His mother wasn’t his mother; his father wasn’t his father; his sister wasn’t his…

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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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  • Tell No One

    Tell No One

    by Brendan Watkins

    A stunning memoir of one man’s search for his birth parents, which uncovered an astonishing global scandal at the heart of the Catholic Church. Brendan Watkins was eight years old when his parents told him he was adopted. When he was in his late twenties,…

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  • The Adoptee’s Journey: From Loss and Trauma to Healing and Empowerment

    The Adoptee’s Journey: From Loss and Trauma to Healing and Empowerment

    by Cameron Lee Small

    Adoption is often framed by happy narratives, but the reality is that many adoptees struggle with unaddressed trauma and issues of identity and belonging. Adoptees often spend the majority of their youth without the language to explore the grief related to adoption or the permission…

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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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  • Practically Still a Virgin: An Adoption Memoir

    Practically Still a Virgin: An Adoption Memoir

    by Monica Hall

    During Alaska’s rough-and-tumble 1970s oil boom, a time when prostitution, violence, and lawlessness reigned, Monica Hall rebels against her strict Catholic parents in a downward spiral of delinquency. Overwhelmed by guilt and shame when the unthinkable happens, Hall is forced to make impossible choices. Will…

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  • In Reunion: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Communication of Family

    In Reunion: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Communication of Family

    by Sara Docan-Morgan

    “Do you know your real parents?” is a question many adoptees are asked. In In Reunion, Sara Docan-Morgan probes the basic notions of family, adoption, and parenthood by exploring initial meetings and ongoing relationships that transnational Korean adoptees have had with their birth parents and other…

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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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  • 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.…

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  • 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…

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  • 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…

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  • 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…

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  • 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…

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  • 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…

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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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  • 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…

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  • 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…

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  • Invisible Boy: A Memoir of Self-Discovery

    Invisible Boy: A Memoir of Self-Discovery

    by Harrison Mooney

    A powerful, experiential journey from white cult to Black consciousness: Harrison Mooney’s riveting story of self-discovery lifts the curtain on the trauma of transracial adoption and the internalized antiblackness at the heart of the white evangelical Christian movement. Inspired by Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man the same way…

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  • Accidental Sisters: The Story of My 52-Year Wait to Meet My Biological Sibling

    Accidental Sisters: The Story of My 52-Year Wait to Meet My Biological Sibling

    by Katherine Linn Caire

    Relinquished at birth to Catholic Charities in 1959, Kathe Linn Caire adores her adoptive family and has never considered searching for her birth parents. At age fifty-two, though, a sudden pull to learn more about her medical history sends her on an unexpected journey. Kathe…

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  • I Must Have Wandered: An Adopted Air Force Daughter Recalls

    I Must Have Wandered: An Adopted Air Force Daughter Recalls

    by Mary Ellen Gambutti

    I Must Have Wandered, a rich hybrid memoir, is a collage of lyrical prose, letters, fragments, vignettes, images, and resources. Born and relinquished in 1951 South Carolina, a baby girl is adopted by a career Air Force couple. Having felt both the primal wound, and ongoing…

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  • No Returns Without Original Receipt

    No Returns Without Original Receipt

    by Diane McConnell

    Renewed courage after learning the final piece of my true heritage has overcome my life-long fear of telling my story. Every adoptee has the right, and many the need, to discover her or his true history, ancestry and identity. Knowledge gives power and confidence. With…

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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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  • 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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  • 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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  • Healing Tree: An Adoptee’s Story about Hurting, Healing, and Letting the Light Shine Through

    Healing Tree: An Adoptee’s Story about Hurting, Healing, and Letting the Light Shine Through

    by Danielle Gaudette

    “Our adopted angel”–that’s what Danielle’s adoptive parents called her. She grew up adored, doted on, unconditionally loved. It wasn’t until she was in college that she first felt a gnawing curiosity about her roots. From time to time, she would wonder: Where did this face…

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  • The Gathering Place: An Adoptee’s Story

    The Gathering Place: An Adoptee’s Story

    by Emma Stevens

    When Emma learns her birth mother wrote and signed a letter about her to the adoption agency, she knew she had to have that letter if she were to ever discover her birth mother’s true identity. Her birth mother had used a fictitious name at…

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  • Love & Genetics: A True Story of Adoption, Surrogacy, and the Meaning of Family

    Love & Genetics: A True Story of Adoption, Surrogacy, and the Meaning of Family

    by Mark MacDonald and Rachel Elliott

    When a family secret comes to light, lives are changed forever in this honest, beautiful, and sometimes painful memoir. When Mark, adopted at birth, set out to find his genetic family as an adult, he found something he never expected–three full-blood siblings, including a persistent…

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  • NoBODY Looks Like Me: An Adoptee Experience

    NoBODY Looks Like Me: An Adoptee Experience

    by Lora K. Joy; illustrated by Laura Foote

    NoBODY Looks Like Me represents what it is like for an adoptee to grow up in a family where they are not genetically related to anyone. There is a longing to know where your eyes, nose and hands come from. When an adoptee decides to…

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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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  • Ripped at the Root: An Adoption Story

    Ripped at the Root: An Adoption Story

    by Mary Cardaras

    “With searing detail and lean, crisp prose, in Ripped at the Root Mary Cardaras tells the story of Dena Polites, a woman born to a young unwed Greek couple who was adopted by married Greek Americans in Ohio. Polites’s tale serves as a focal point…

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