I met Patricia in 2023 at the first Untangling Our Roots conference, where we discovered we shared a love for writing, sailing, and The Velveteen Rabbit. What we both loved about that book is the idea of becoming real. As the skin horse said, “it doesn’t happen all at once . . . it takes a long time.” And by the time it happens “most of your hair has been loved off.” The horse goes on to say “these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real, you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

What I appreciate most about Wonderland is how it strives to provide a better understanding of the darker side of adoption, while acknowledging that we adoptees are not being ugly or unappreciative when we speak our truths. Once we understand who we are and what happened to us, that is when we become real.

This is not a book about addiction per se. But it is evident that addiction, and the havoc it wreaks, is the subtext atop which this story unfolds. Here, addiction lives in a household where substances are the family’s primary coping strategy for unacknowledged grief, for unnamed shame, generational trauma, and for losses never mourned. For readers unfamiliar with adoption trauma, it may be tempting to read these dynamics as isolated dysfunctions or moral failures. But Wonderland refuses such simplifications.

Decades of research have shown that relinquishment itself is a trauma, disrupting attachment, identity formation, and nervous system regulation. When a relinquishee is placed with caregivers battling their own trauma, the child’s developing psyche carries far more than it should. Seen through this lens, Patricia’s story becomes adaptive.

Her struggles are not random. Nor are they evidence of inherent brokenness. They reflect the collision of adoption trauma with family dysfunction, layered atop an already fractured beginning. One of the great strengths of this memoir is its refusal to collapse complexity into blame. Rather than ask us to excuse harm, Patricia asks us to understand it.

This is extraordinarily difficult work. For adoptees, there is often unspoken pressure to remain grateful, to protect the narrative of rescue, to silence anger in favor of loyalty. For children of addicted persons, there is a parallel pressure to manage, excuse, and emotionally parent the very people who are meant to provide safety. Wonderland explores the collision of these roles — the adoptee trying to love, live with, and save her addicted saviors — without sentimentality or excuses.

And then there is the matter of documentation. For an adoptee, whose identity is already shaped by legal erasure and reinvention, to live forty-seven years with a fraudulently obtained birth certificate is to move through the world without institutional recognition of one’s existence. This undocumented life becomes a powerful metaphor for the deeper question at the heart of this book: Who in the world am I?

Patricia also asks us to look beyond the individual and examine the systems that made such harm possible. Without adequate oversight, trauma-informed screening, and post-placement support, adoption can replicate the very conditions it claims to remedy. Wonderland does not argue against adoption. It argues for honesty and accountability. For a system willing to acknowledge complexity rather than relying on myths of salvation and gratitude.

At its core, Wonderland: Memoir of a Black-Market Adoption is a memoir about one woman’s ascent out of the dense fog of black-market adoption and into identity, belonging, and authentic self. It’s about the search for wholeness when your existence was never legally documented. How trauma cascades through generations, and the courage required to expose the truth.

This book asks us to resist binary thinking and to expand our capacity for compassion without erasing responsibility. For those willing to enter its depths, it offers a compelling journey and profound respect for the resilience of the human psyche. Ultimately, this is a story about one unbreakable woman becoming real.

— David B. Bohl