American Adoption

In Bitterroot Susan Devan Harness traces her journey to understand the complexities and struggles of being an American Indian child adopted by a white couple and living in the rural American West. When Harness was fifteen years old, she questioned her adoptive father about her “real” parents. He replied that they had died in a car accident not long after she was born—except they hadn’t, as Harness would learn in a conversation with a social worker a few years later.

The adoption business was founded on secrecy and lies. American Baby lays out how a lucrative and exploitative industry removed children from their birth mothers and placed them with hopeful families, fabricating stories about infants' origins and destinations, then closing the door firmly between the parties forever. Adoption agencies and other organizations that purported to help pregnant women struck unethical deals with doctors and researchers for pseudoscientific "assessments," and shamed millions of women into surrendering their children.

Andre Monroe is ready to move on from heartbreak, and the first step is bringing home his rescue pup. He’d bonded instantly with the playful Zeus and was already planning their first adventures. But one thing he definitely hadn’t daydreamed about was Zeus accidentally being promised to someone else - or that he might go home empty-handed and brokenhearted all over again.

In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned - from the layout of the winding roads to the colors of the houses to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules. Enter Mia Warren - an enigmatic artist and single mother - who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenage daughter, Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons.

A powerful decade-long study of adoption in the age of Roe, revealing the grief of the American mothers for whom the choice to parent was never real.

On a warm day in September 2000, a woman named Zanhua gave birth to twin girls in a small hut behind her brother’s home in China’s Hunan province. The twins, Fangfang and Shuangjie, were welcome additions to her family but also not her first children. Living under the shadow of China’s notorious one-child policy, Zanhua and her husband decided to leave one twin in the care of relatives, hoping each toddler on their own might stay under the radar. But, in 2002, Fangfang was violently snatched away.

Wards of the State by journalist and author Claudia Rowe widens an eye-opening case from a true-crime lens to an exploration of the foster care-to-prison pipeline. The system is broken—hundreds of thousands of children every year leave America’s $30 billion dollar foster care system and enter its prisons, where in some cases, 75 percent of inmates are former foster kids. Through the stories of eight former foster kids, Rowe illustrates exactly where, when, and how the system is failing the children that it parents.

Some secrets free you. Some secrets destroy you. This time, the truth will cost everything. She thought she was in the clear, that the past was buried forever. But then it happened. A devastating truth about someone she loves comes to light, and the perfect life she’s clung to finally shatters. Tiffany has carried guilt for years, but nothing prepares her for the secret about her daughter that threatens to destroy everything—and everyone—she thought she was protecting. And Charity? She’s spent years chasing husbands that that never belonged to her while her own marriage crumbled. ...

For those praying about building a family through adoption, this easy-to-listen, straight-forward guide is a valuable insight. Called to Adoption offers tips, and up-to-date, relevant information every parent considering adoption should know. Listeners will identify with author Mardie Caldwell's personal and professional experiences, making this resource a vital handbook as parents take steps to adopt.

When we first meet the young man at the center of this extraordinary and moving story, he is one of 13 children by a mother addicted to crack; he does not know his real name, his father, his birthday, or any of the things a child might learn in school. And he has no serious experience playing organized football.

Meena Dave is a photojournalist and a nomad. She has no family, no permanent address, and no long-term attachments, preferring to observe the world at a distance through the lens of her camera. But Meena’s solitary life is turned upside down when she unexpectedly inherits an apartment in a Victorian brownstone in historic Back Bay, Boston.

Nicole Chung was born premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. From childhood, she heard the story of her adoption as a comforting, prepackaged myth. She believed that her biological parents had made the ultimate sacrifice in the hope of giving her a better life, that forever feeling slightly out of place was her fate as a transracial adoptee. But as Nicole grew up, she wondered if the story she'd been told was the whole truth.

Who are the children of foster care? What, as a country, do we owe them? Cris Beam, a foster mother herself, spent five years immersed in the world of foster care looking into these questions and tracing firsthand stories. The result is To the End of June, an unforgettable portrait that takes us deep inside the lives of foster children in their search for a stable, loving family. Beam shows us the intricacies of growing up in the system - the back-and-forth with agencies, the rootless shuffling between homes, the emotionally charged tug between foster and birth parents.

Identical twins Isabella and Hà were born in Vietnam and raised on opposite sides of the world, each knowing little about the other’s existence, until they were reunited as teenagers, against all odds. Award-winning journalist Erika Hayasaki spent years and hundreds of hours interviewing each of the birth and adoptive family members and tells the girls’ incredible story from their perspectives, challenging conceptions about adoption and what it means to give a child a good life.

Rebecca Carroll grew up the only Black person in her rural New Hampshire town. Adopted at birth by artistic parents who believed in peace, love, and zero population growth, her early childhood was loving and idyllic - and yet she couldn’t articulate the deep sense of isolation she increasingly felt as she grew older. Everything changed when she met her birth mother, a young White woman, who consistently undermined Carroll’s sense of her blackness and self-esteem.

Abrán González always knew he was different. Called a coyote because of his fair skin, the kid from Barelas found escape through boxing and became one of the youngest Golden Gloves champs. But the arrival of a letter from a dying woman turns his entire life into a lie. The revelation that he was adopted makes him feel like an orphan and sends him on a quest to find his birth father.

Kiss Mommy Goodbye is a major new novel from bestselling author Nicholas Walker. Peter Webb is a rock superstar living in California who has everything, but his failing relationships with women leave him hankering back to when he was a simple schoolteacher and on a whim he adopts a fourteen year old girl. Getz, was removed from abusive parents and placed with foster parents and when the story starts it has just been discovered that the foster Father has been sexually assaulting her for the last three years. She has become a highly disturbed young girl who cannot stand any male touching her ...

The end of World War Two brought peace to many but not to all. For some people, in a world gripped by resentment, paranoia and epidemics, the fruits of victory seem forever out of reach. Three women, scarred by war, struggle to remake their lives in the war’s long shadows. Rachael Klein gave her son David to save him from the Nazi death camps. Viviane Renaud took him in at terrible cost to herself and her family. Dorothy Pine risked her life to befriend the vulnerable family. Despite all odds, Rachael survives the death camps and returns to take David back. Yet she struggles to rebuild ...

Two men, each unaware of the other, share a common family secret: They were sold for adoption by their American father shortly after their births in the Philippines. Three alternating stories interweave the experiences of father Andrew Breszky and the two sons who try to connect and piece together the puzzle of their reckless, impulsive father. One lives in New York and the other grows up in the south of France, later traveling all over Asia as a documentary filmmaker. Both will discover that their relationships somehow echo that of the young man whose history eludes them.

A historical fiction book set in Garrison City, a small cattle town in the American West during the late 19th century. In "Son of an Outlaw," the story unfolds in the rugged heart of the American West, where the past casts long shadows over the present. Isabella Beaumont, a fierce and compassionate woman, raises the infant son of the notorious outlaw Black Henry Grady after she witnesses his dramatic demise. As the years go by, Isabella strives to shield Oliver from the grip of his father's criminal legacy, but as he nears his twenty-fifth birthday, the chains of history tighten, forcing ...