Looking for your next summer read? We’ve gathered a list of compelling, adoption-related books published within the past three years—perfect for diving into during these slower, sun-soaked months. Many of these titles are written by friends of Adoption Network Cleveland, including past conference speakers, Monday Evening Speaker Series presenters, and others connected to our community. Whether you’re personally or professionally connected to adoption, or simply looking to learn more through powerful storytelling and fresh perspectives, these books offer insight, reflection, and meaningful conversation starters.
If you’ve read any of them and would like us to share your review—or if you have a recommendation we missed—we’d love to hear from you! Reach out to Savannah Johns at savannah.johns@adoptionnetwork.org to contribute.
Hole in My Heart: Love and Loss in the Fault Lines of Adoption
Lorraine Dusky
In the days before Roe v. Wade, an ambitious young journalist, abandoned by her beau, leaves Michigan for a dream job on the city desk of a Rochester, New York newspaper. Burned once, she's eager for love, but as the only Girl in the newsroom, she's more concerned with finding allies and making friends.
When a new leading man appears, she recognizes a kindred spirit. Soon her bylined stories claim front-page space. However, when she becomes pregnant, she must switch her attention from deadlines to decisions.
With adoption on the horizon, she pushes her man to make a commitment. Sadly, he wants her, but not their daughter. Will Dusky ever find the little girl she longed to raise, and if she does, what will be the fallout from their years apart?
In Hole in My Heart, the author uses her skills as a journalist to report on the social history and long-term consequences of family separation. If you like true stories with strong women narrators, you’ll love Lorraine Dusky’s timely and heart-rending memoir about motherhood, identity and love.
Written by a leader in the movement to reform adoption practices and the first to come out of the era's closet of shame. With footnotes, bibliography and index. Learn more here.
Adoption Unfiltered: Revelations from Adoptees, Birth Parents, Adoptive Parents, and Allies
Sara Easterly, Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, and Lori Holden
Reveals the candid thoughts and feelings of those most directly involved in adoptions: adoptees, adoptive parents, and birth parents.
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 space of adoption may seem like a lofty goal, it reveals the authors' optimistic aim: working together with truth and transparency to move toward healing.
Healing isn't possible, though, without first uncovering the hurts, starting with adoption's central players: adoptees, who are so often in pain, suffering from what the latest brain science validates as the long-term emotional effects of separation trauma. By encouraging others to vulnerably share their stories, the authors discover that adoptees aren't the only ones in the adoption constellation who are hurting. Birth parents regularly shut down after being shut out by adoptive parents. Adoptive parents often struggle with unique parenting challenges and hidden insecurity, feeling the need to hide the fact that they are not the Super Parents they led the agency to believe they would be. Across the industry as a whole, misinformed and even unethical practices abound. Learn more here.
Practically Still a Virgin: An Adoption Memoir
Monica Hall
Practically Still a Virgin is the riveting memoir of a fifteen-year-old adoptee’s rape —and the pregnancy that changed her life.
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 she keep her rapist’s identity a secret and defy her parents when they demand to know who fathered her baby? Will Hall, an adoptee herself, crumble under pressure and relinquish her only known blood relative for adoption? Will she ever feel the sense of belonging she craves by reuniting with the mother who gave her away?
Adopted during infancy, Hall’s childhood is marked by trauma and dysfunction. As a teenager, she dulls her pain with risky behavior and petty crime. In adulthood, she turns to drugs and alcohol. This gutsy memoir chronicles her decades-long quest for identity, healing, and redemption. As she uncovers secrets and searches for her roots, she makes a shocking discovery about her baby’s father, smashing the narrative that shaped her reality for decades.
Hall tells of her troubled youth with candor and compassion for herself and everyone around her. Her story will resonate with anyone who knows loss, secrets, and family dysfunction. Learn more here.
Adoptive Privilege: A Memoir of Reinventing my Adoptee Narrative
Dr. Abigail K. Hasberry
Adopting Privilege is Dr. Hasberry’s attempt at not only reckoning with her past, but offering unfiltered guidance to other transracial adoptees, and the larger adoption community, navigating what it means to exist in a familial limbo while also discovering what it means to simply exist.
Abigail Hasberry is no stranger to adoption. As both a Black adoptee to a white family, and a birth mother, her intimate understanding of this experience has shaped her career as both a therapist and transracial adoption scholar. However, the intricacies of transracial adoption narratives leave much to be discovered, and with stories often shared from the perspective of the adoptive family, the most affected group—the adoptees—are often left to fend for themselves in their own self-discoveries.
As the voices of transracial adoptees gain prominence in academic, literary, and creative works, Adopting Privilege emerges as both a timely and vital contribution to the discourse. Through the lens of an adoptee, Dr. Hasberry’s debut memoir explores the triumphs, challenges, and complexities of transracial adoption, the nuances that make it difficult to hold space for oneself, and the experience that comes with adopting outside of race. Learn more here.
Dr. Beare's Daughter: Growing Up Adopted, Adored, And Afraid A True Story
Janice Jones
It was 1947 in Celina, Ohio, when charismatic doctor and surgeon, Ralph Beare and his socialite wife, Lou, childless and in their early forties, adopted a four-and-a-half-month-old infant. Everyone in town knew she was adopted, and recognized Dr. Beare’s Daughter on sight. With her red hair and freckles, she looked nothing like her dark-haired parents. She also said and did things her parents did not expect of their own child.
Finding herself an outlier in her family and at school, she struggled to be that elusive, golden child she imagined her parents really wanted, while also struggling with the strict rules of the Catholic Church. Being Dr. Beare's Daughter came with an erasure of her own identity. Despite her efforts to be that perfect child, there was a small voice, deep inside her, that popped up at the most inconvenient times, saying, "I'm here." Try as she might to silence it, her true self sometimes slipped out to take charge, and then there was trouble. Learn more here.
I Would Meet You Anywhere: A Memoir
Susan Kiyo Ito
A Library Journal best memoir of 2023 • Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography • Finalist, William Saroyan International Prize for Writing
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. Though the two share a physical likeness, an affinity for ice cream, and a relationship that sometimes even feels familial, there is an ever-present tension between them, as a decades-long tug-of-war pits her birth mother’s desire for anonymity against Ito’s need to know her origins, to see and be seen. Along the way, Ito grapples with her own reproductive choices, the legacy of the Japanese American incarceration experience during World War II, and the true meaning of family. An account of love, what it’s like to feel neither here nor there, and one writer’s quest for the missing pieces that might make her feel whole, I Would Meet You Anywhere is the stirring culmination of Ito’s decision to embrace her right to know and tell her own story. Learn more here.
Twice the Family: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Sisterhood
Julie Ryan McGue
Growing up as an adoptee and identical twin, Julie McGue will take you on her journey for identity and individuality, searching for answers through tragedy and adversity.
“A heartfelt exploration of connection, community, and the unbreakable bond between sisters . . . Her journey beautifully reminds us of the strength we find within ourselves as we seek to uncover where we truly belong.”— Simone Knego, author of The Extraordinary UnOrdinary You
In this coming-of-age memoir, set in Chicago’s western suburbs between the 1960s and ’80s, adopted twins Julie and Jenny provide their parents with an instant family. Their sisterly bond holds tight as the two strive for identity, individuality, and belonging. But as Julie’s parents continue adding children to the family, some painful and tragic experiences test family values, parental relationships, and sibling bonds.
Faced with these hurdles, Julie questions everything—who she is, how she fits in, her adoption circumstances, her faith, and her idea of family. But the life her parents have constructed is not one she wants for herself—and as she matures, she recognizes how the experiences that formed her have provided her a road map for the person and mother she wants to be. Learn more here.
Adoption Memoirs: Inside Stories
Marianne Novy
Adoption Memoirs tells inside stories of adoption that popular media miss. Marianne Novy shows how adoption memoirs and films recount not only happy moments, but also the lasting pain of relinquishing a child, the racism and trauma that adoptees such as Jackie Kay and Jane Jeong Trenka experienced, and the unexpected complexities of child-rearing adoptive parents Emily Prager and Jesse Green encountered.
Novy considers 45 memoirs, mostly from the twenty-first century, by birthmothers, adoptees, and adoptive parents, about same-race and transracial adoption. These adoptees, she recounts, wanted to learn about their ancestry and appreciated adoptive parents who helped. Birthmother Amy Seek shows why open adoption is not simple, and many other memoirs tell stories that continue past reunion.
Adoption Memoirs will enlighten readers who lack experience with adoption and help those looking for a shared experience to also understand adoption from a different standpoint. Learn more here.
Grandmothering While Black: A Twenty-First-Century Story of Love, Coercion, and Survival
LaShawnDa L. Pittman
In Grandmothering While Black, sociologist LaShawnDa L. Pittman explores the complex lives of Black grandmothers raising their grandchildren in skipped-generation households (consisting only of grandparents and grandchildren). She prioritizes the voices of Black grandmothers through in-depth interviews and ethnographic research at various sites—doctor's visits, welfare offices, school and day care center appointments, caseworker meetings, and more. Through careful examination, she explores the various forces that compel, constrain, and support Black grandmothers' caregiving.
Pittman showcases a fundamental change in the relationship between grandmother and grandchild as grandmothers confront the paradox of fulfilling the social and legal functions of motherhood without the legal rights of the role. Grandmothering While Black illuminates the strategies used by grandmothers to manage their legal marginalization vis-à-vis parents and the state across a range of caregiving arrangements. In doing so, it reveals the overwhelming and painful decisions Black grandmothers must make to ensure the safety and well-being of the next generation. Learn more here.
Abandoned at Birth: Searching for the Arms that Once Held Me
Janet Sherlund
In Abandoned at Birth, Janet Sherlund explores the inherent need adopted children have for a sense of belonging and the pain and courage that is required to discover their true identity.
Adoption is often painted as a happy, inspirational act—a baby finds a family and lives happily ever after. But the truth is that adopted children experience displacement and rupture from their mother and that trauma can impact an individual for a lifetime. Adoption can lead to feelings of loss and grief not just for the adoptee, but for the biological and adoptive parents as well.
This startling fact comes vividly to life in Janet Sherlund’s heartbreaking memoir, Abandoned at Birth. In her literary debut, Janet Sherlund explores the complex issues so many adoptees and their parents grapple with, including the complicated emotions of rejection, loss, grief, denial, and shame.
Sherlund, who was given up for adoption within days of her birth, shares her journey to fulfill her lifetime longing for connection with her family of origin, her instinctive ache for connection with her birth mother, and what it was like to have a “borrowed identity.” In poignant detail, Sherlund describes her quest to find out who she is, where she came from, and why she was given away. And she reveals the pain and courage required to discover one’s true identity.
With 5 million adoptees in the U.S., many of whom are discovering their biological roots on DNA websites, Abandoned at Birth is the book for our time. The insight Sherlund derived from her journey will encourage and console others on the same path, while examining the inherent need of all of us to belong, and understand our origins, our culture, and our genetic roots. Learn more here.
Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood
Dr. 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 path of constrained choice for those for whom abortion is inaccessible, or for whom parenthood is untenable. The stories of relinquishing mothers are stories about our country's refusal to care for families at the most basic level, and to instead embrace an individual, private solution to a large-scale, social problem.
With the recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization revoking abortion protections, we are in a political moment in which adoption is, increasingly, being revealed as an institution devoted to separating families and policing parenthood under the guise of feel-good family-building. Rooted in a long-term study, Relinquished features the in-depth testimonies of American mothers who placed their children for domestic adoption. The voices of these women are powerful and heartrending; they deserve to be heard. Learn more here.
The Gathering Place: An Adoptee’s Story
Emma Stevens
The true story of 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 the maternity home and used an assumed name on Emma's original birth certificate. Emma takes bold measures to get ahold of that letter and start solving the puzzle that is her life.
Emma was adopted into a family that expected her to conform to their expectations of who she should be — but she did not arrive as a blank slate. Unable to see that her relinquishment and adoption were not her fault, her soul split into pieces. In order to put the pieces back together, Emma embarks on multiple journeys and adventures towards both solving the mystery of who she is, and healing from the pain of separation from her origins.
Emma powerfully describes a childhood and life profoundly affected by not knowing her true self. Has she ever known her true self?
It's a story of inner strength and perseverance where Emma welcomes all her parts of self to feel valued and seen. She fights to reunite her fractured soul through love and acceptance of herself, and of others. In a meditative and surreal state, under and around a big old oak tree with a simple wood-seated and rope swing attached, she accepts the invitation of integrating herself. And this reunion all takes place at The Gathering Place. Learn more here.
Beth Syverson and Joseph Nakao
This book is a wake-up call to those impacted by adoption and to those who interact with them. According to preliminary results of a groundbreaking study out of Winston-Salem State University (final report targeted for release in 2025), adopted people are 36.7 times more likely to attempt suicide than their non-adopted peers. And birth/first mothers are 40 times more likely to attempt suicide than non-relinquishing women.
This book is meant to be a quick read and certainly does not replace professional help. Readers can dip into this little book at any time to grab the information they need at that moment, whether it’s a poignant poem, a list of articles about adoption and suicide, or a personal story that inspires the reader to keep going another day.
Adoption and Suicidality will speak to anyone with direct experience of adoption and suicide or suicidal ideation, plus anyone who wants to know how to better help adopted people (and others in the adoption constellation) who are struggling. Learn more here.
Who Is a Worthy Mother?: An Intimate History of Adoption
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 debate over women’s reproductive rights places an even greater emphasis on adoption. As a mother, historian, and adoptee, Rebecca C. Wellington is uniquely qualified to uncover the policies and practices of adoption. Wellington’s timely—and deeply researched—account amplifies previously marginalized voices and exposes the social and racial biases embedded in the United States’ adoption industry.
The history of adoption is rarely told from an adoptee’s perspective. Wellington remedies this gap by framing the chronicle of adoption in America using her own life story. She describes growing up in a family with which she had no biological connection, giving birth to her own biological children, and then enduring the death of her sister, who was also adopted. As she reckons with the pain and unanswered questions of her own experience, she explores broader issues surrounding adoption in the United States, including changing legal policies, sterilization and compulsory relinquishment programs, forced assimilation of babies of color and Indigenous babies adopted into white families, and other liabilities affecting women, mothers, and children.
According to Wellington, US adoption practices in America are shrouded in secrecy, for they frequently cast shame on unmarried women, women struggling with fertility, and “illegitimate” babies and children. As the United States once again finds itself embroiled in heated disputes over women’s bodily autonomy—disputes in which adoption plays a central role—Wellington’s book offers a unique and much-needed frame of reference. Learn more here.
Adoption Paradox: Putting Adoption in Perspective
Jean Kelly Widner
Adoption—peeling back the glossy exterior…
Adoption impacts countless families worldwide, yet the voices of those directly involved—especially adoptees, the central focus of the process—are rarely highlighted. In The Adoption Paradox, nearly one hundred individuals are interviewed (including Adoption Network Cleveland’s own Betsie Norris), from domestic, international, and transracial adoptions, as well as foster care, along with adoptive and birth parents, therapists, experts, and allies. These narratives reveal both the love and the emotional costs borne by everyone affected, exposing adoption as a complex and challenging experience. Healing is possible with the right support, but addressing adoption’s hidden issues requires activism to confront unethical practices that lack oversight. These moving stories shed light on unaddressed pain and systemic flaws, calling for a more transparent and compassionate approach to adoption. Learn more here.
Looking for more books or other resources? Download our full Recommended Book List.
If you’ve read any of the above titles and would like us to share your review—or if you have a recommendation we missed—we’d love to hear from you! Email savannah.johns@adoptionnetwork.org to contribute.
