Orphaned as a child, Jane has felt an outcast her whole young life. Her courage is tested once again when she arrives at Thornfield Hall, where she has been hired by Edward Rochester to care for his ward Adèle. Jane finds herself drawn to his troubled yet kind spirit and falls in love with him. However, there is a terrifying secret inside the gloomy, forbidding Thornfield Hall. Is Rochester hiding from Jane? Will Jane be left heartbroken and exiled once again?
Little orphan Heidi goes to live high in the Alps with her gruff grandfather and brings happiness to all who know her on the mountain. When Heidi goes to Frankfurt to work in a wealthy household, she dreams of returning to the mountains and meadows, her friend Peter, and her beloved grandfather.
This heartwarming story that takes place in “an old-fashioned farm outside a town called Avonlea. Anne Shirley, an eleven-year-old orphan, has arrived in this verdant corner of Prince Edward Island only to discover that the Cuthberts—elderly Matthew and his stern sister, Marilla—want to adopt a boy, not a feisty redheaded girl”. Before they send her back, Anne wins them over completely. This is “a much-loved classic that explores all the vulnerability, expectations, and dreams of a child growing up, Anne of Green Gables is also a wonderful portrait of a time, a place, a family… and, most of all, love”.
A Single Square Picture: A Korean Adoptee’s Search for Her Roots
Kim Ji-yun, who grew up in Seoul, Korea soon became Catherine Jeanne Robinson, who had an American family and lived in Salt Lake City, Utah. Twenty years later, she returned to Seoul in search of her birth mother and found herself “an American outsider in her native land”. Katy was left “conflicted, shattered, exhilarated, and moved in ways she never imagined”. This book is “a personal odyssey that ascends to the universal”, and is “a story that will resonate with anyone who has ever questioned their place in the world — and had the courage to find the answers”.
In this true story, journalist Mei-Ling Hopgood, one of the first wave of Asian adoptees to arrive in America, “comes face to face with her past when her Chinese birth family suddenly requests a reunion after more than two decades. | In 1974, a baby girl from Taiwan arrived in America, the newly adopted child of a loving couple in Michigan”. Hopgood had an “all-American upbringing, never really identifying with her Asian roots or harboring a desire to uncover her ancestry”. | When Hopgood was in her twenties, her birth family showed up. They end up being “a boisterous, loving, bossy, complicated middle-class family who hound her daily life by phone, fax, and letter, in a language she doesn’t understand until she returns to Taiwan to meet them. As her sisters and parents pull her into their lives, claiming her as one of their own, the devastating secrets that still haunt this family begin to emerge. Spanning cultures and continents, Lucky Girl brings home a tale of joy and regret, hilarity, deep sadness, and great discovery as the author untangles the unlikely strands that formed her destiny”.
In Their Own Voices: Transracial Adoptees Tell Their Stories
This is a collection of interviews conducted with Black and biracial young adults adopted by white parents. It entails personal stories of two dozen individuals “who hail from a wide range of religious, economic, political, and professional backgrounds”. Some things this book explores is “How does the experience affect their racial and social identities, their choice of friends and marital partners, and their lifestyles?” The book includes overviews of both the history and current legal status of transracial adoption as of 2000.
This book is a “seminal work which revolutionizes the way we think about adoption. It describes and clarifies the effects of separating babies from their birth mothers as a primal loss which affects the relationships of the adopted person throughout life”. This book also discusses pre-and perinatal psychology, attachment, bonding, and loss and gives adoptees, whose pain has long been unacknowledged or misunderstood, validation for their feelings, as well as explanations for their behavior. Additionally, it lists “the coping mechanisms which adoptees use to be able to attach and live in a family to whom they are not related and with whom they have no genetic cues”. The hope is that this book will “contribute to the healing of all members of the adoption triad and will bring understanding and encouragement to anyone who has ever felt abandoned”.
Attaching in Adoption: Practical Tools for Today’s Parents
This is a comprehensive guide for prospective and current adoptive parents on ways to understand and care for the adopted child and promote healthy attachment. It provides “practical parenting strategies designed to enhance children’s happiness and emotional health” and explains “what attachment is, how grief and trauma can affect children’s emotional development, and how to improve attachment, respect, cooperation and trust”. The listed parenting techniques are “matched to children’s emotional needs and stages, and checklists are included to help parents assess how their child is doing at each developmental stage”. This book covers a wide range of issues including international adoption, Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, and learning disabilities. It is also geared as an important resource for adopted professionals.
The Lost Daughters of China: Abandoned Girls, Their Journey to America, and the Search for a Missing Past
This book presents a cultural history of the events that led to the controversial one-child policy in China and the generation-long abandonment of Chinese daughters to American families.
Adoption Literature for Children and Young Adults: An Annotated Bibliography (Bibliographies and Indexes in Sociology)
This is an annotated bibliography that covers literature published from 1990 to 1991 suitable for children and young adults “dealing in some fashion with adoption”. There are 503 titles in this volume and are divided into fiction and nonfiction by reading level. “Most of the books included feature adoption as a main theme, others use adoption as a secondary theme, while others have characters who just happen to be adopted”. The bibliography encompasses topics such as “the age of arrival, sibling adoption, single-parent adoption, foster parent adoption, step-parent and relative adoption, transracial and intercountry adoption, Amerasian children, racial identity, minority families, special needs, large families, birthparents, search and reunion, surrogacy and open adoption, and some of the less pleasant aspects of adoption”. It is compiled by a reference librarian who is also an adoptive parent. There is also a featured selective resource list and directory of adoption-related organizations.