Heart Eater: A Memoir of Immigration, Belonging, and How We Find Ourselves in Language

Heart Eater traces the author's childhood and how she went from being a nameless, abandoned nine-month-old baby in Seoul, South Korea to, as an adult, becoming an award-winning Asian American author who writes in multiple genres. The book is made of short essays, or "field notes," that explore moments and experiences in the author's life that made her pay extra attention to the words being used.

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Torn from the Root: A Memoir of a Black Transracial Adoptee

As a Black child adopted out of the New York foster care system as a toddler and raised by white evangelical parents, Rhonda Roorda had to learn how to walk in two different worlds. She often questioned "whether my skin was too dark" and if she "acted too white." She recalls being haunted by feelings of shame and not being enough.

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Twice Delivered : A Story of Two Families, Two Worlds, and One Redeeming Love

Born in a remote mountain village in Ethiopia, Isaac Melber's life began with loss. Orphaned at a young age and placed in an orphanage, his future seemed uncertain-until a family from Kentucky crossed an ocean to bring him home. But Isaac's story is more than an adoption story. In Twice Delivered, Melber shares the raw, deeply moving journey of growing up between two worlds-wrestling with grief, identity, anger, belonging, and faith.

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Love and Happiness

England, 1971. Harriet Bush is eight years old, cross-legged on her brother's bed, reading Swallows and Amazons and scratching at the wallpaper. Love and Happiness follows Harriet across two decades; from a Congleton childhood through Stockport flat-shares, from the adoption papers that arrive on her sixteenth birthday to an extraordinary piece of engineering that will make her briefly notorious. She is Black, adopted, raised by a white family who love her fiercely and understand her imperfectly.

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Adoption Ruins and Unearthed Tokens: Baby Scoop Era Adoption Memoir

As far back as she could remember, Shirley Munro had always known that she was adopted. What she didn’t know, at first, was how those two words, “you’re adopted,” were layered in mystery, forbidden identity, deceptions, and wishful fairytales -- and then covered up with “in your best interest.” This memoir has been lovingly stitched together with poetry, anecdotal storytelling, soul-stirring recollections, and histories.

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When the World Explodes: Essays

How do you survive when your world explodes? By the time she was seven, Amy Lee Scott had seen her world end twice: first as an infant, when adoption brought her from Korea to Ohio, and again when her adoptive mother died of cancer. Orphaned twice over, Scott confronts her personal chaos by investigating a litany of historic catastrophes and the disruptions that followed.

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An Accident of Birth: A Story of Adoption and Identity

When a stranger who turns out to be his niece receives an extra 23andMe test by mistake, it changes Alex Blum's life forever. At the age of sixty, Alex Blum made a life-altering discovery: he was the eldest of four biological brothers he never knew existed. Born in 1955, Blum had always known he was adopted, yet the secrecy of the era kept every detail of his origins sealed.

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On Human Adoption: and the Manufacture of Identity

What is adoption, really? On Human Adoption begins where most adoption narratives end: not with the social idea of rescue, but with what follows. Using New Zealand as a case study, a country whose adoption legislation both mirrors and illuminates the intent of adoption law across the English-speaking world, Dr Barbara Sumner examines adoption as a legal and ideological construct that erases biological identity in the service of the state.

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Relative Strangers: Inheritance, Identity, and the Meaning of Kinship

What’s it like when a complete unknown is actually close family? In Relative Strangers: Inheritance, Identity, and the Meaning of Kinship—a provocative anthology curated by B.K. Jackson, with a foreword by Libby Copeland, twenty-eight acclaimed and emerging writers explore the transformative experience of encountering unknown close relatives. These are intimate stories by those who’ve spent years longing and searching for their unknown biological families and by others shocked to discover they have parents or siblings they never dreamed of—blindsiding revelations that demand both a radical recalibration of identity and a redefinition of family.

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Finding Mary Smith: A Memoir of Family Secrets, Gray Market Adoption, and the Miracle Reunion with My Mom

What if everything you knew about yourself turned out to be only half the story? Comedian Al Isaacs grew up as an only child with loving parents, a gift for laughter, and a simple truth about his family until an innocent phone call from his mother's doctor just weeks before his father's passing exposed a decades-old family secret-he had been part of a gray-market adoption, hidden behind false paperwork and decades of silence.

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Adoptee Reading: An Adoption Book Catalog Bookshop

Founded in 2015, Adoptee Reading helps adopted people discover books and other writing about adoption from the adoptee perspective. Find our full list of nearly 500 titles at AdopteeReading.com, which...

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P.S. I Think of You Often: A Journey Into Understanding

Some questions follow us from the beginning. Brenda Laface was adopted as an infant. She built a life that looked complete from the outside: a marriage, a family, the roles that society had already drawn the outline for. But the questions she carried about who she was and where she came from never quieted. And when the life she had constructed finally cracked open, she found herself doing the one thing she had been trained to do: she looked honestly at what was inside.

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One of Us: A Novel

It’s 1915 and the world is transforming, but for thirteen-year-old Bolt and Eleanor—twins so close they can literally read each other’s minds—life is falling apart. When their mother dies, they are forced to leave home under the care of a vicious con man who claims to be their long-lost uncle Charlie, the only kin they have left. During a late-night poker game, when one of his rages ends in murder, they decide to flee.

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Visiting My Parents by Lee Langvad, trans. by Hazel Evans

In this excerpt from Lee Langvad's novel My Interpreter – translated from Danish by Hazel Evans – an adoptee narrator who lives in Denmark goes for a…

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REVIEW: Relative Strangers: Inheritance, Identity and the Meaning of Kinship, Edited by B.K. Jackson | Hippocampus Magazine

Amy Roost reviews the anthology, Relative Strangers: Inheritance, Identity and the Meaning of Kinship, Edited by B.K. Jackson.

hippocampusmagazine.com

Weirdo: Tales of a Geek Adoptee

Weirdo: Tales of a Geek Adoptee delivers an inside look at adoption during the Baby Scoop Era, chronicling a shocking part of American history that should never be forgotten. Relinquished for adoption in the late 1960s, Heather Massey grew up knowing few details about her origins, with the rest shrouded in secrecy. Yet one fact was certain: she was a geek in a family of normies who couldn't understand her passion for anime and science fiction.

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Adopting the Page: Writing Myself Back to Life — Rewriting Adoption

Korean adoptee Mee Ok Icaro shares how illness, grief, plant medicine, and writing led her back to her adoption story—and ultimately helped her reclaim her voice, identity, and sense of belonging.

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Adoptee Reading Is Back!

Hello again, adoptee readers! Some of you may have noticed that Adoptee Reading has been inaccessible for many months. In late 2025, I realized that the site was being inundated with traffic origin…

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What They Stole: A Familicide Rooted in Intercountry Adoption

In 1955, following the devastation of the Korean War, Bertha and Harry Holt made headlines for adopting eight Korean children. Driven by evangelical convictions and emboldened by a special act of Congress, the couple founded the Holt Adoption Program, which would facilitate the migration of tens of thousands of Korean children to the United States over the following decades. The Sueppels were among the families profoundly shaped by the legacy of the Holt Adoption Program.

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God Save the Children | Kristen Martin

Harry and Bertha Holt were called by God to “save” multiracial Korean children—many of whom did not need saving.

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One Book One Minnesota - The Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library

One Book | One Minnesota is a statewide book club that invites Minnesotans of all ages to read a common title and come together virtually to enjoy, reflect,

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