Showing titles in Adoption & Fostering

Author and Instagram star Heather Avis has made it her mission to introduce the world to the unique gifts and real-life challenges of those who have been pushed to the edges of society. Mama to three adopted kids - two with Down Syndrome - Heather encourages us all to take a breath, whisper a prayer, laugh a little, and make room for the wildflowers.

A deeply personal and heart-breaking memoir that explores the troubled relationship between Mary Garden and her younger sister, Anna, who died in 2023 after a short illness. Mary unpacks her life of growing up in New Zealand in the 1950s and ’60s, before making Australia home. She reveals complex layers of intergenerational trauma, including the baggage of her eccentric, deeply flawed father and the secret her mother kept from all of them, revealed only after her death. Mary deals movingly with her sister’s long battle with mental illness and how she once saved Anna’s life.

2nd Place Winner for Women's Fiction in the 2021 Pencraft Awards 2021 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award Finalist for Fiction Other In the summer of 1993, on the ninth anniversary of her Mama’s death, Sandy runs away. Having a fear of germs is inconvenient when you’re on a road-trip adventure. However, needing to know what it’s like to have a mom, and to finally see the beach means more than anything to an eleven-year-old. Some sixteen years later, a man Sandy never wanted to see again shows up at her doorstep. When Sandy’s best friend places an ultimate life-changing decision in her ...

How does a mother cope when she is forced to walk away from her three children and never see them again? That is what happened to JB's mother, Myrtle. Eventually, rescued from her despair by tall, dark, and handsome George Rowley, who fell in love with her, Myrtle started a new life and had seven more children. She buried the grief of losing her first children deep within and kept her pain secret. JB and her siblings were unaware of the existence of Myrtle's first three children until after she died.

"It sounded at first like something out of an old horror movie. I thought maybe someone was just playing around, but then I heard it again and again, a loud piercing cry, and less like Hollywood every time. The windows were down in my police cruiser on that warm fall day, but I still couldn’t tell where the sounds came from. I began looking around for the unlikely sight of someone being disemboweled in a mall parking lot on a Saturday afternoon. Seeing nothing, and still hearing the screams, I called in a “disturbance”.... Around the next corner I found the source of the commotion.

Michelle and her brothers are fresh out of foster care when they're reunited with their father in southern Ohio. Michelle has dreams of mending fractures in her family and moving past the trauma of the previous 12 years. But leaving the stability and guidance of a loving foster family, she discovers her single father is plagued with PTSD and not equipped to handle raising her and her brothers.

Therapeutic parenting is a deeply nurturing parenting style, and is especially effective for children with attachment difficulties, or who experienced childhood trauma. This book provides everything you need to know in order to be able to effectively therapeutically parent. Providing a model of intervention, The A-Z of Therapeutic Parenting gives parents or caregivers an easy to follow process to use when responding to issues with their children.

Motherhood So White is the story of Nefertiti's fight to create the family she always knew she was meant to have and the story of motherhood that all American families need now. In this unflinching account of her parenting journey, Nefertiti examines the history of adoption in the African American community, faces off against stereotypes of single, Black motherhood, and confronts the reality of raising children of color in racially charged, modern-day America.

As a child, Susan Silverman was surrounded by a loving family; although her parents weren't happily married, they were devoted to their kids. In a vibrant, funny, imminently relatable voice (think Anne Lamott meets Katrina Kenison), Silverman tells of a family's evolution - from her parents' devastating loss of their infant son to raising bright and wildly unique daughters. It's also the creation story of her own family - raising her own bright and wildly unique daughters and taking a journey to adopt two boys from Ethiopia.

Evie and Elliot are scrawny, filthy and scared when they turn up on foster carer Maggie Hartley's doorstep. Aged just two and three years old, this brother and sister have hardly set foot outside their own home. They have been prisoners, locked in a world of abuse, violence and neglect. Maggie soon realises that Evie and Elliot are lacking the basic life skills we all take for granted, and the outside world terrifies them. Gradually unlocking the truth of their heartbreaking upbringing, Maggie tells their shocking true story.

This book is a wake-up call to those impacted by adoption and to those who interact with them. Adoption and Suicidality will speak to anyone with direct experience of adoption and suicide or suicidal ideation, plus anyone who wants to know how to better help adopted people (and others in the adoption constellation) who are struggling.

At only five years old, Saroo Brierley got lost on a train in India. Unable to read or write or recall the name of his hometown or even his own last name, he survived alone for weeks on the rough streets of Calcutta before ultimately being transferred to an agency and adopted by a couple in Australia. Despite his gratitude, Brierley always wondered about his origins.

In the much-anticipated follow-up to Sunday Times best seller Trapped, foster carer Rosie Lewis tells the heartbreaking true story of Zadie. When the young teenage girl, thrown out of her home by her strict Muslim family, is discovered hiding on the city streets by the police, it is clear that all is not as it should be. Taught to believe that Westerners should not be trusted, when Zadie is initially delivered into the experienced hands of foster carer Rosie, she is understandably suspicious of the family around her.

Jack Rocco was a baby when he was adopted by a blue-collar, Italian American family. Today a successful orthopedic surgeon, Jack’s identity was built around his Italian heritage, and while he knew the story of his “Gotday,” he didn’t know the story of his birth day. His was a closed adoption, and he only knew that his birth parents were a young couple—an Italian father and a German Irish mother—who couldn’t afford a child.

In her groundbreaking first book, 20 Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew, Sherrie Eldridge gave voice to the very real concerns of adopted children, whose unique perspectives offered unprecedented insight. In this all-new companion volume, Eldridge goes beyond those insights and shifts her focus to parents, offering them much-needed encouragement and hope.

In the late 1950s, when a shy, 13-year-old girl and a 15-year-old, outgoing boy fall in love in a small Midwestern town, population 695, their happiness is short-lived when they discover she is pregnant. Forced by their very young ages and family expectations, they place their child up for adoption and separate—each living their lives apart for 53 years. But a corner of Dennis' heart still belonged to Karen. Despite the many passing years, he searches for and finds his lost love, and later, together they find their daughter. Love is not what you say; love is what you feel.

For those praying about building a family through adoption, this easy-to-listen, straight-forward guide is a valuable insight. Called to Adoption offers tips, and up-to-date, relevant information every parent considering adoption should know. Listeners will identify with author Mardie Caldwell's personal and professional experiences, making this resource a vital handbook as parents take steps to adopt.

Through Adopted Eyes explores the world of adoption from the viewpoint of adoptees. Russian adoptee Elena S. Hall shares her own story and thoughts on the subject of adoption in addition to interviews from other adoptees of different ages, heritages, and perspectives. Whether you are an adoptive parent, curious about adoption, or an adoptee yourself, this unique collection of memoirs provides real insight into lives directly impacted by adoption.

It was 1947 in Celina, Ohio, when Dr. Ralph Beare and his wife, Lou, childless and in their early forties, adopted a four-and-a-half-month-old orphan. “Janice” knew she was adopted, because her mommy read her a book about how the Beare's chose her out of a Home. "We chose you, but we love you as if you were our own." However, her mother never seemed to forget she was adopted, especially on Mother’s Day, when she couldn’t look at Janice without crying.

Gerrold, a science fiction writer from California, adopts a son who has a slight behavioral problem. He believes himself to be a Martian. Gerrold begins the long, involving work of trying to earn the acceptance of Dennis, a hyperactive eight-year-old who desperately wants a father's love, but is so insecure he feels he must be an alien. Gerrold's semi-autobiographical memoir of the first two years with Dennis is a funny, endearing, heartbreaking, and beautifully written testament to fatherhood.