This blog is the second part of my “Top Twelve” of the books I’ve reviewed this year. My last blog reviewed picture books, including three from my Adoption Books with Great Art series, and also fictional offerings for pre-teens and early teens. This blog is on my favorite nonfiction about adoption.
The Adoption Guide 2008 stands out as a compact yet comprehensive resource. It contains articles on infant adoption, international adoption, and foster-adoption. It has a summary of adoption trends and current regulations for twelve countries, a state-by-state listing of agencies and attorneys, guides for choosing an agency and/or attorney, adoption statistics, articles on financing an adoption, on the homestudy process. It presents a detachable “Adoption Planner”, with a “Decision Matrix” to help prospective parents define what type of adoption suits their family best, sample budgets and timelines, questions to ask adoption agencies and/or attorneys, a homestudy preparation worksheet, a “Dear Birthmother” Letter and information on talking with an expectant mother considering placing her child for adoption, and tips on using the Internet throughout the adoption process. The Guide also includes reflections from adoptive parents, including one woman’s dilemma of an initially reluctant spouse and a couple’s diary of their journey to Vietnam to meet their daughter.
While The Adoption Guide is packed with information, The Adoption Decision is personal. It tells about the author’s two domestic infant adoptions and about several false starts and near-adoption heartaches. The author also shares anecdotes from other couples and some poetry written by her son’s birthmother as she asks adoptive parents to thoughtfully consider several issues as they make their own adoption decision.
The Girls Who Went Away tells the powerful stories of some of the birthmothers who surrendered their babies for adoption between 1945 and 1973.
A Euro-American on a Korean Tour at a Thai Restaurant in China tells one mother’s story of attempting to integrate her children’s Korean heritage into their family while acknowledging that there are limits to what she, as a Euro-American, can understand about her children’s experiences. It tells of her efforts to make contacts with the local Korean community, the effect on her birth son of the family’s trips to Korea, her daughter’s reunion with birth family, and the story of a young Korean man who was raised in an orphanage.