Here are 100 books that The Adoption Papers fans have personally recommended if you like
The Adoption Papers.
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I was adopted as a baby, so I have first-hand experience of the emotions and challenges this presents. I am passionate about shining light on this often misunderstood and complex family trauma through my writing. My memoir Blood and Blood, an emotive exploration of the search for my birth relatives, was shortlisted for the Mslexia Prize. My research extends to fiction and non-fiction, where the psychological effects of adoption are referenced or highlighted. I am always keen to chat with fellow care-experienced people. I hope you find the books on this list helpful.
One thing about being adopted is you have an in-built radar to seek out others who are too. I read Jeanette Winterson’s first novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit when I was a teenager, and since then, I have been in awe of her as a writer and her ability to eloquently describe her personal experience as an adoptee.
This book is her autobiography, and there were occasions while reading it that I had to stop and cry. Finally, someone else had written about what I had kept holed up inside me. Her final chapter, "The Wound," speaks so profoundly to me as an adopted adult. It is honest, sharp, and fierce.
The shocking, heart-breaking - and often very funny - true story behind Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.
In 1985 Jeanette Winterson's first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was published. It was Jeanette's version of the story of a terraced house in Accrington, an adopted child, and the thwarted giantess Mrs Winterson. It was a cover story, a painful past written over and repainted. It was a story of survival.
This book is that story's the silent twin. It is full of hurt and humour and a fierce love of life. It is about the pursuit of happiness,…
When I was going through the process of adopting my second child, after having my first by a more conventional route, I looked for diverse representations of mothering to help me make sense of my journey. These recommended books helped me to understand the lived experience from all sides of the adoption triangle: adoptee, birth mother, and adopter. I was curious about the experience of other mothers whose children have an additional mother and found a lack of life writing on surrogacy and egg donation. As a published novelist and poet, I decided to move into experimental life writing and undertook a PhD in Creative Writing to discover and write their stories.
Carole Schaefer’s poignant memoir presents the story of a naïve, young, Catholic American woman falling pregnant outside of marriage and being pressured to give up her baby for adoption in 1965 at age nineteen. The book charts an eighteen-year journey to tracing and meeting her birth son.
The book’s unusual vantage point makes for compelling reading, offering insight into an experience seldom written about.
In 1965, Carol Schaefer was 19, a freshman in college and deeply in love. She was also pregnant. When her boyfriend’s family opposed their marrying, her parents sequestered her in a Catholic home for unwed mothers a state away, where she was isolated and where secrecy prevailed. She had only to give up her baby for her sin to be forgiven and then all would soon be forgotten she was told. The child, in turn, would be placed with a “good” family, instead of having his life ruined by the stigma of illegitimacy. Carol tried to find the strength to…
When I was going through the process of adopting my second child, after having my first by a more conventional route, I looked for diverse representations of mothering to help me make sense of my journey. These recommended books helped me to understand the lived experience from all sides of the adoption triangle: adoptee, birth mother, and adopter. I was curious about the experience of other mothers whose children have an additional mother and found a lack of life writing on surrogacy and egg donation. As a published novelist and poet, I decided to move into experimental life writing and undertook a PhD in Creative Writing to discover and write their stories.
Sally Donovan’s book is a memoir by an adoptive mother of two children who were removed from their birth family due to abuse and neglect. It’s an eye-opening, and at times eye-watering, read, educating the reader about the complexities of mothering children who have experienced trauma. It is also a deeply moving book about ‘hope, love and healing.’
Anyone considering adopting would benefit from reading this book.
An uplifting true story of an ordinary couple who build an extraordinary family, No Matter What describes how Sally and Rob Donovan embark upon a journey to adopt following a diagnosis of infertility.
Sally Donovan brings to life with characteristic wit and honesty the difficulties of living with infertility, their decision to adopt and the bewildering process involved. Finally matched with young siblings Jaymey and Harlee, Sally and Rob's joy turns to shock as they discover disturbing details of their children's past and realise that they must do everything it takes to heal their…
When I was going through the process of adopting my second child, after having my first by a more conventional route, I looked for diverse representations of mothering to help me make sense of my journey. These recommended books helped me to understand the lived experience from all sides of the adoption triangle: adoptee, birth mother, and adopter. I was curious about the experience of other mothers whose children have an additional mother and found a lack of life writing on surrogacy and egg donation. As a published novelist and poet, I decided to move into experimental life writing and undertook a PhD in Creative Writing to discover and write their stories.
Carrie Etter’s haunting poetry collection presents the imaginings of a birth mother who gave up her child for adoption when she was seventeen, exploring the many diverse visions she has of her son as an adult. The poet sees her son everywhere: in the supermarket, on the train, in the park.
This is a profoundly affecting collection that I could not put down.
"In Imagined Sons Carrie Etter reflects on the experience of a birthmother who gave up her son when she was seventeen. In a series of haunting, psalm-like prose poems of enormous courage and insight, she describes possible encounters with this son now in his late teens, expressing how 'sometimes the melancholy arrives before the remembering'. The series of 'Birthmother's Confessions' return to repeated, harrowing questions that yield different answers at different moments. This quite extraordinary book by a writer of great imagistic power and skill ('hair the dark red of a nectarine pit') leaves a mark on the reader which…
I am adopted. I am a birth mother and also a mother through adoption. I have lived through all ‘three faces’ of adoption and know how each ‘face’ affects millions of people's lives all over the world. I am passionate that conversations around adoption need to come out of the closet and the secrecy surrounding the subject must disappear. By writing my books, I am on a mission to support adoptees, birth mothers, and adoptive parents and help them realise they are not alone. After publication of my first book in the Survival Without Roots trilogy, I am humbled that people are reaching out to say that reading Book One has helped them so much.
As a follow-on from her first book, Fiona tells us of her never-ending search for love and affection and the difficulties in forging relationships. I was rooting for her to have a happy ending. If you have read This is Me: No Darkness Too Deep, then you must read this second book in Fiona's trilogy to see where her adoptee journey takes her. It's not the ending I expected!
Fiona Myles author of This is me – No Darkness to Deep presents her second book This Is Me – I’m Adopted a true-life autobiography. Fiona was adopted at 8 months old. From the age of 6 when her first real memory of being told she was adopted registered, she started to feel different. Always being reassured she was special, chosen and wanted seemed to just enhance that feeling of not being the same as her brother and sister. Emotionally the struggle was intense as instead of being able to speak about how she was…
I am a book publicist of roughly twenty years, a writer, and a reader. My award-winning short story collection, To Lay to Rest Our Ghosts (Fomite Press, 2017), deals with family, reconciliation, loss, and hope. My first novel, Geographies of the Heart (Fomite Press) was released in January 2022. It’s about the importance of forgiveness, the power of legacies, and the fertile but fragile terrain that is family, the first geography to shape our hearts. I am surrounded by books, live and breathe books, work with books. Lucky me!
Spare and poetic, this beautiful debut novel explores teenage pregnancy, adoption, and secrets. Addie Lockwood knows Roland Rhodes during high school. They live in a small Southern town and develop a friendship over an appreciation of blues music. But later, in their thirties, when they reconnect in California, Addie falls in love with Roland. When she later realizes she’s pregnant, she makes a critical and heartbreaking decision: she doesn’t tell Roland about the baby, whom she names Byrd, and she gives the child up for adoption. But Addie never stops thinking about Byrd, wondering, hoping one day he will fly back her way. This novel is gorgeously written and what an ending.
Chautauqua Prize Finalist, 2015 Crook's Corner Book Prize for Best Debut Novel Set in the American South, 2015 Independent Publisher Book Award, Bronze Medal for Literary Fiction, 2015 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize Long List, 2014 SIBA Book Award Long List, 2015 Balcones Fiction Prize Finalist, 2015
Addie Lockwood believes in books. Roland Rhodes believes in blues guitar. Coming of age in the small-town South of the 1970s, they form a friendship as extraordinary as it is unlikely.
They meet again in their disillusioned thirties, this time in California, where Roland's music career has landed him. Venice Beach is exotic, a…
I don’t just write stories, I study them. I’ve noticed that nearly every major hero/ine’s journey and epic tale has an adoption component. From Bible stories and Greek myths (adoption worked out well for Moses, not so much for Oedipus) to Star Wars through This Is Us, we humans are obsessed with origin stories. And it’s no wonder: “Where do I come from?” and “Where do I belong?” are questions that confound and comfort us from the time we are tiny until we take our final breath. As an adoptive mother and advocate for continuing contact with birth families, I love stories about adoption, because no two are alike. They give us light and insight into how families are created and what it means to be a family—by blood, by love, and sometimes, the combination of the two.
The pioneering godmother of the open-adoption movement in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, Silber did ground-shaking work to bring transparency to the adoption process, which ultimately, is better for the mental health of all parties involved. In Dear Birthmother, a primer of sorts, she helps adoptive parents understand the love, humanity, and loss intrinsic to placing a child for adoption. I love this book because it shines a light on the much-deserved compassion to these women who give up so much in search of a better life for themselves and their children.
This is the third revised edition of the open adoption classic recommended by the Child Welfare League of America. Gently provocative, warm and convincing, this open adoption guide includes actual letters between adoptive parents and birthparents, and between the latter and the children they have
I am the author of over fifty books for young readers including the Zapato Power series, the Sofia Martinez series, Duck for Turkey Day, Unite or Die: How Thirteen States Became a Nation, Never Say a Mean Word Again, Tag Your Dreams: Poems of Play and Persistence, and The Porridge-Pot Goblin.Many of my books were inspired by my students during my days as a school librarian. Other books were inspired by my work as a Jewish educator in synagogue settings. I read voraciously and review for the Sydney Taylor Shmooze, an online blog about Jewish books.
Imani is thirteen and approaching her Bat Mitzvah. She is also an African-American adopted by a white Jewish family.
She has many questions about her birthparents and her own place in the world. When she has the opportunity to read the diary of her adopted mother’s grandmother who fled Europe as a Jewish refugee during World War II, Imani learns why sometimes mothers make impossible choices to save their children’s lives.
This novel is a riveting mix of history and coming of age.
Imani is adopted, and she's ready to search for her birth parents. Anna has left behind her family to escape from Holocaust-era Europe to meet a new family--two journeys, one shared family history, and the bonds that make us who we are. Perfect for fans of The Night Diary.
Imani knows exactly what she wants as her big bat mitzvah gift: to find her birth parents. She loves her family and her Jewish community in Baltimore, but she has always wondered where she came from, especially since she's black and almost everyone she knows is white. Then her mom's grandmother--Imani's…
I wasn’t a sporty teen, but I discovered rock climbing in my twenties and that later inspired my first novel, The Art of Holding On and Letting Go. I’m also a social worker, and even though my main character Cara is a competitive climber and the book features gripping (ha!) rock climbing scenes, the story is about much more – love and loss, finding home, the transformative power of nature. Sports and athleticism (or lack thereof) are something we can all relate to. What a great starting point for exploring our multi-faceted lives.
This coming-of-age novel features a sixteen-year-old star baseball playing girl, but that’s just the beginning. Alex is biracial, raised in a white family, and she struggles to find where she fits in. Race, gender, identity, adoption, body image – this novel explores hard-hitting issues with the complexity they deserve. I especially appreciate that the author wrote from her own experience as a transracial adoptee.
"Transracial adoption is never oversimplified, airbrushed, or sentimentalized, but instead, it's portrayed with bracing honesty as the messy institution it is: rearranging families, blending cultural and biological DNA, loss and joy. An exceptionally accomplished debut." — Kirkus, starred review
For as long as she can remember, sixteen-year-old Alex Kirtridge has known two things about herself: She's a stellar baseball player. She's adopted.
Alex has had a comfortable childhood in Madison, Wisconsin. Despite some teasing, being a biracial girl in a wealthy white family hasn't been that big a deal. What mattered was that she was a star on the diamond,…
I am an adoptive parent and I often use stories to help my children to understand and process emotive topics. While we were going through the adoption process, I couldn’t find any stories that adequately explained why some children can’t stay with their birth families, so I decided to create my own! I found the waiting during the adoption process quite unbearable and put every spare minute to good use, reading books by adoptees and birth parents, so that I could understand the experiences of the people affected most by adoption. These autobiographies were a tough, emotional read at times, but they all changed me for the better.
It is rare to find the view of a birth father in a story or online, so I was keen to read this to help widen my perspectives. This insightful, reflective autobiography helped me to imagine how my son’s birth father may be affected by the adoption. Andrew shares how the loss of his son to adoption has affected so many of his choices throughout the rest of his life. I read this around the time that I was due to write a contact letter to my son’s birth parents, and I feel that it helped me to write something that I hope his birth parents will find supportive and reassuring, rather than a superficial update to “tick the box.”
In the first-ever British birth-father memoir, Andrew Ward reflects on his own experience of losing a child to adoption to show how a traumatic teenage incident complicated his life. Thirty years after the adoption Ward set out to break down barriers, find his son and seek resolution. In this book he describes his search and, through flashback stories, illustrates how being a birth father has impacted on his relationships with women, career decisions, writing projects and assembly of attitudes. This is a book about secrecy, shame and self-punishment, but it is also a book about wonderful friendships, amazing coincidences and…