God Painted Me
This is a children’s picture book that discusses transracial adoption. It uses religion to portray adoption and human creation.
Resource Category: Literature
Free to Be… A Family: A Book About All Kinds of Belonging
This is a collection of stories, poems, and songs about different types of families and family relationships. The central concept of this anthology is that…
I Wished for You: An Adoption Story for Kids
This story follows a conversation between a child and his mother and their conversation about God and family. This book affirms how love is what…
A Forest of Doors: An Orphan’s Quest
This novel is about a young orphan who dreams of reuniting her family after decades of separation. She begins a quest and gains more than…
Delly Duck: Why A Little Chick Couldn’t Stay With His Birth Mother
This is a children’s picture book that centers around a foster care adoption story. It’s meant to help explain adoption support, kinship care, and special…
Adoption Is a Lifelong Journey
This book highlights the adoption journey as a child adoptee. It provides insight into the emotions and thoughts an adoptee or foster child, while also…
The Red Thread: An Adoption Fairy Tale
This story originates from the ancient Chinese belief that an invisible, unbreakable red thread connects everybody destined to be together. In this children’s book, a…
What Is a Family?
In this Waldorf-style illustrated book, with depictions of families of all shapes, sizes and colors, kids discuss their families. It conveys that even though families…
Matilda
This is a classic fiction book about a precocious, intellectual girl and her journey through life and school. The protagonist (Matilda) is characterized as astonishingly…
The Red Blanket
This is the story of the author’s journey to China to adopt a baby girl. It’s a heartwarming adoption story that reveals the challenges, as…
A Mother for Choco
This is a children’s book about a young bird (Choco) who journeys to find a mother who looks just like himself. Eventually, he is taken…
Ten Days and Nine Nights: An Adoption Story
This book follows a little girl as she and her family prepare for a new child. It shows the girl’s mother flying off to Korea,…
Tell Me Again About the Night I Was Born
This book is “a special celebration of the love and joy an adopted child creates for a family. In asking her parents to tell her…
A Family Is a Family Is a Family
This is children’s storybook that talks about the vast and varied types of families. The book features families of every shape, size and relation. The…
The Boxcar Children
This is a book series following the four Alden siblings, who make their home in a boxcar. The books focus on themes such as family,…
I’ve Loved You Since Forever
This is a celebratory and poetic testament to the timeless love felt between parent and child. This picture book is inspired by the heartwarming story…
The Pinballs
This is a fictitious story about a young girl, Carlie, and her journey through foster care. She befriends the other children that she shares a…
Before We Were Yours
Based on true events, this book is about The Foss children’s journey with loss and being placed into an orphanage. This book focuses on the…
Adoption Stories: Excerpts from Adoption Books for Adults
This book emphasizes that adoptees have varying backgrounds. It argues that adoptees have the right to ask questions about their background (adoption documents, agency, etc.).…
Foster Child
This book is about a young girl who is cared for by her great grandmother. When her great grandmother is placed into a nursing facility,…
Last Airlift: A Vietnamese Orphan’s Rescue from War
This is a true story about life in a Saigon orphanage, a rescue flight from Vietnam to Canada, and international adoption. It tells the story…
Adopted Jane
This book is about a girl who has lived in an orphanage for most of her life. She has acted as a caretaker for other…
My Forever Family: from fostering to adoption
This children’s book is about a young boy’s journey from foster care to adoption. It highlights the adoption process in simple terms and is meant…
I Love You Like Crazy Cakes
This is a children’s book that tells the story of a woman who travels to China to adopt a baby girl. It’s based on the…
The Family Book
In this children’s picture book, the author celebrates many different types of families. He assures readers that no matter what kind of family you have,…
The White Swan Express: A Story About Adoption
This is a children’s picture book that talks about the process of adoption from China. It shows the steps from the adoption agency paperwork, to…
Great Expectations
Another classic work of fiction, this book is about a young orphan boy with grand dreams. This is a tale of crime, guilt, morality, and…
Oliver Twist
This is a classic, fictitious story about a young orphan who runs away to live with a group of pickpockets. Dickens created an entirely new…
All You Can Ever Know
This is a memoir by Korean-American adoptee Nicole Cheung. She tells the story the search for the people who gave her up, which coincided with…
Palimpsest: Documents From a Korean Adoption
This is an illustrated memoir by a Swedish-Korean adoptee about her life as an adoptee. The author (Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom) explores her feelings related to…
Adoption Literature for Children and Young Adults: An Annotated Bibliography (Bibliographies and Indexes in Sociology)
This is an annotated bibliography that covers adoption literature published from 1990 to 1991 suitable for children and young adults. There are 503 titles in…
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…
Attaching in Adoption: Practical Tools for Today’s Parents
This is a comprehensive guide for adoptive parents on how to care for adopted children and promote healthy attachment. It explains what attachment is, how…
The Primal Wound
This book clarifies the effects of separating babies from their birth mothers as a primal loss, affecting the relationships of the adopted person throughout life.…
In Their Own Voices: Transracial Adoptees Tell Their Stories
This is a collection of interviews of Black and biracial young adults adopted by white parents. It features personal stories of two dozen individuals “who…
Lucky Girl: A Memoir
This is the true story of Mei-Ling Hopgood, one of the first wave of Asian adoptees to arrive in America. She never identified with her…
A Single Square Picture: A Korean Adoptee’s Search for Her Roots
This book is about a Korean-American adoptee who returned to Korea at 20 to search for her birth mother. The author cites feeling conflicted, shattered,…
Anne of Green Gables
This is a fictitious story about Anne Shirley, an eleven-year-old orphan who isn’t embraced by her adoptive family. Before they send her back, Anne wins…
Heidi
This is a story about a young orphan (Heidi) who lives with her grandfather. When Heidi goes to Germany to work in a wealthy household,…
Jane Eyre
This is a book about an orphan (Jane) who has felt outcast her entire life. Jane moves for work and falls in love with the…
Stellaluna
This is a children’s book about a lost young bat who finds her way safely home to her mother and friends. It explores themes of…
