November is National Adoption Awareness Month, a time to celebrate families created through adoption. There is even a National Adoption Day that takes place on the Saturday before Thanksgiving to finalize adoptions from foster care into permanent families. This year that day is November 22.
The Literacy & Learning Collection contains materials that are not easily confined in either the adult, young adult, or juvenile collections. You can find guidance here on many topics including the unique challenges that come with parenting an adopted child. Adoptee-centered stories are changing the narrative around how adoption is talked about by all sides of the adoption community — birth parents, adoptive parents, adoption professionals, and of course, adoptees themselves. Here are some newer books in our Literacy & Learning Collection or interfiled with the pictures books, available at the Davenport Public Library, as of the publication of this post. Descriptions from the publishers.
“You should be grateful”: Stories of Race, Identity, and Transracial Adoption by Angela Tucker. Tucker is grateful for many aspects of her life, but being a Black woman adopted into a white family involved layers of rejection, loss, and complexity that cannot be summed up easily. She now serves as a mentor to other transracially adopted children and, in this book, draws from her experiences with mentees to invite a profound exploration of a complicated system. Tucker offers practical tools for nurturing identity, unlearning white saviorism, and addressing the mistakes many adoptive parents don’t even know they’re making. She flips the script on ‘traditional’ adoption books written by adoptive parents or professionals to center the experience of adoptees themselves. These perspectives challenge the fairy-tale narrative of adoption, giving way to a fuller story that explores the impacts of racism, classism, family, love, and belonging.
The Adoptee’s Journey: From Loss and Trauma to Healing and Empowerment by Cameron Lee Small. Adoption is often framed by happy narratives, but the reality is that many adoptees struggle with unaddressed trauma and issues of identity and belonging. Adoptees often spend the majority of their youth without the language to explore the grief related to adoption or the permission to legitimize their conflicting emotions. Adoptee and counselor Cameron Lee Small names the realities of the adoptee’s journey, narrating his own and other adoptees’ stories in all their complexity. He unpacks the history of how adoption has worked and names how the church influenced adoption practices with unintended negative impacts on adoptees’ faith. Small’s own tumultuous search for and reunion with his mother in Korea inspired him to help other adoptees navigate what it means to carry multiple stories.
Adoption Memoirs: Inside Stories by Marianne Novy. Adoption Memoirs tells inside stories of adoption that popular media miss. Marianne Novy shows how adoption memoirs and films recount not only happy moments, but also the lasting pain of relinquishing a child, the racism and trauma that adoptees experienced, and the unexpected complexities of child-rearing adoptive parents encountered. Novy considers 45 memoirs, mostly from the twenty-first century, by birthmothers, adoptees, and adoptive parents, about same-race and transracial adoption. These adoptees, she recounts, wanted to learn about their ancestry and appreciated adoptive parents who helped. Adoption Memoirs will enlighten readers who lack experience with adoption and help those looking for a shared experience to also understand adoption from a different standpoint
Eyes that Weave the World’s Wonders by Joanna Ho. From New York Times bestselling Joanna Ho, of Eyes that Kiss in the Corners, and award-winning educator Liz Kleinrock comes a powerful companion picture book about adoption and family. A young girl who is a transracial adoptee learns to love her Asian eyes and finds familial connection and meaning through them, even though they look different from her parents’. Her family bond is deep and their connection is filled with love. She wonders about her birth mom and comes to appreciate both her birth culture and her adopted family’s culture, for even though they may seem very different, they are both a part of her, and that is what makes her beautiful. She learns to appreciate the differences in her family and celebrate them.
I Have Two Families: A Children’s Book About Adoption by Kendra Smith. I Have Two Families is for children aged 5 to 9 who have been through adoption or who are going to be adopted. Written with love by a licensed marriage and family therapist who has both professional and personal experience with adoption, I Have Two Families offers kids a relatable look at open adoption. Parents and caregivers can use the book to help start conversations about what it means to be adopted and how to process all the big questions and feelings that kids may have about their own adoption.
