2024 Gave Us 15 Powerful Adoption Books: The Hits and Hidden Gems”

Patricia Knight Meyer

2024 Gave Us 15 Powerful Adoption Books: The Hits and Hidden Gems

As I reflect on 2024’s contributions to adoption literature, I’m struck by the depth, courage, and compassion these authors bring to our community’s ongoing conversation about the lifelong impacts of adoption. From in-depth research to intimate memoirs, these works illuminate different facets of the adoption experience. While some titles on this list have already garnered significant attention, I’ve included other books about adoption that may have slid under your radar. I wish I could say I have read them all, but I can’t. Those I have yet to read will be sliding into 2025 with me.

I encourage you to explore these works, support these brave and brilliant authors, and join the conversation by leaving thoughtful reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. By amplifying adoption voices, we strengthen our community and help others find the resources and stories they need. Whether you’re an adoptee, birth parent, adoptive parent, NPE, donor conceived or ally, you’ll find profound insights within these pages.

Here is to 2025, and all the books about the reality of adoption that the new year will bring. Follow the links below to Amazon to learn more about each of these wonderful contributions to the adoption community. Be sure to also check my resources section for adoption books and resources.

1. “The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be” by Shannon Gibney (January 9, 2024) Shannon, a transracial adoptee, blends adoption memoir with speculative fiction in this Printz Honor Book, exploring parallel lives while incorporating official documents and family records.

2. “In Better Hands” by Brandi Cox (January 16, 2024) Brandi shares her Appalachian story of adoption intersecting with poverty, addiction, and trauma, offering practical healing strategies while highlighting rural America’s unique challenges.

3. “To Be Real” by Anne Heffron (February 18, 2024) Anne gathers multiple adoptee voices in this intentionally authentic collection. Together, they examine maternal separation trauma through raw, authentic experiences.

4. “The Branches We Cherish” by Linda R. Sexton (February, 20, 2024)
Linda chronicles her three-decade journey with open adoption, beginning in 1992 when she and her husband David embarked into largely uncharted territory. Through interweaving perspectives of birth parents, birth grandmothers, adoptive parents, and adopted children, she illuminates how open adoption shapes family bonds over time.

5. “Relinquished” by Gretchen Sisson (February 27, 2024) A sociologist, Gretchen spent a decade interviewing birth mothers about their experiences with private adoption, revealing the systemic pressures and limited choices they faced. Her research reframes adoption as a reproductive rights issue, especially crucial in post-Roe America.

6. “Practically Still a Virgin” by Monica Hall (March 23, 2024) Monica, both an adoptee and birth mother, shares her story of teenage pregnancy in 1970s Alaska. Her unique perspective reveals adoption’s cyclical impact across generations.

7. “Who Is a Worthy Mother?” by Rebecca Wellington (April 9, 2024) Rebecca, an adoptee and historian, weaves her personal narrative with rigorous research to expose adoption industry biases. She examines how race, class, and social status influence society’s view of who is “worthy” of motherhood.

8 . “Crossing the Cherry Blossom Sea” by M. Rosales (April 23, 2024) In this compelling memoir, M. Rosales recalls the day she was torn away from South Korea at the age of five alongside her younger sister, to live with an American family. With barely any memories of her former life, Rosales navigates the complexities of loss, grief, identity, and abuse while growing up in the Pacific Northwest, affecting her once inseparable bond with her sister.

9. “Abandoned at Birth” by Janet Sherlund (May 7, 2024) In her literary debut, Janet Sherlund explores the complex issues so many adoptees and their parents grapple with, including the complicated emotions of rejection, loss, grief, denial, and shame. Sherlund, who was given up for adoption within days of her birth, shares her journey to fulfill her lifetime longing for connection with her family of origin, her instinctive ache for connection with her birth mother, and what it was like to have a “borrowed identity.” In poignant detail, Sherlund describes her quest to find out who she is, where she came from, and why she was given away. And she reveals the pain and courage required to discover one’s true identity.

10. “The Girl with Three Birthdays” by Patti Eddington (May 7, 2024) Framed by a brief but poignant 1963 “Report of Investigation” based on a caseworker’s one-day visit to Patti’s childhood home, The Girl With Three Birthdays tells the story of an adoptee who always believed she was the answer to a couple’s seventeen-year journey to become parents, until a manila envelope from a rural county court arrived and caused her to question . . . everything.

11. “Woman of Interest” by Tracy O’Neill (June 25, 2024)

In 2020, Tracy O’Neill began to rethink her ideas of comfort and safety. Just out of a ten-year relationship and thirtysomething, she was driven by an acute awareness that the mysterious mother she’d never met might be dying somewhere in South Korea.

After contacting a grizzled private investigator, O’Neill took his suggested homework to heart when he disappeared before the job was done, picking up the trail of clues and becoming her own hell-bent detective. Despite COVID-19, the promise of what she might discover—the possibility that her biological mother was her kind of outlaw, whose life could inspire her own—was too tempting.

12. “Adoption Memoirs: Inside Stories” by Marianne Novy (June 28, 2024) Marianne analyzes 45 adoption memoirs, identifying patterns in how adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive parents process trauma, race, and reunion experiences.

13. “Adoption and Suicidality” by Beth Syverson & Joseph Nakao (August 11, 2024) Beth and Joseph, an adoptive mother and adoptee, collaborate to address adoption’s hidden mental health crisis. Drawing from groundbreaking research, they combine personal stories with practical resources to support families and professionals.

14. “A Real Nobody a Fake Somebody and Me” by Sherry Bridgette Healey (September 3, 2024) Sherry, a victim of forced adoption, exposes how government policies legally erased birth identities. Her raw memoir draws powerful parallels to historical human rights violations.

15. “Hidden Girls” by Julia MacDonnell (September 5, 2024) Julia shares her fifty-year journey as a birth mother during the Baby Scoop Era. Her reunion with her relinquished son unveils patterns of institutional shame and secrecy that affected millions of women.

A Few More Bonus Adoption Books

After sharing this post, a couple other 2024 adoption books were brought to my attention. This year has certainly been great for raising awareness and sharing the adoptee and first parent perspectives.

“Adoption Songs” by Lori Evans Ermi (July 9, 2024)
Lori weaves together fifteen adoption stories, sparked by a chance encounter that led to an epiphany about the need to share these narratives. Drawing from her own experience as an adoptee who kept her adoption secret for years, she explores the universal theme of belonging that runs through the adoption community.

“Connecting Threads” by EM Blake (July 2024)
EM delivers a graphic memoir about five siblings separated by foster care and closed adoption. Through illustrated storytelling, she traces her journey as an Ojibwe/Anishinaabe and European adoptee searching for belonging, culture, and her first family. Her unique visual narrative explores how five siblings, placed in foster care and adopted into three different families, found their way back to each other.