Molly's Reads

ADOPTION
ANTHOLOGIES/MEMOIRS
- A Love Like No Other: Stories from Adoptive Parents Edited by Pamela Kruger and Jill Smolowe. Read an excerpt.
- Instant Mom by Nia Vardalos. Read an excerpt.
- Chasing Kites: One Mother’s Unexpected Journey Through Infertility, Adoption, and Foster Care by Rachel McCracken. Read an excerpt.
- Stranger Care: A Memoir of Loving What Isn’t Ours by Sarah Sentilles. Read an excerpt.
Published by Riverhead, 2005
Amazon LinkOnly now did we truly grasp how many sacrifices we – yes, we, middle-class Americans with jobs and money and grandparents dying to help out – would have to endure for the sake of this one little child.
Published by HarperOne, 2013
Amazon Link“I have bad news.” I am staring at his mouth. It’s as if I can see the words he’s just said floating in between us. I want those words to unform. I want the letters to scramble, go back into his mouth, and come out as a different sentence.
Published by Rachel McCracken, 2018
Amazon LinkThere is no magic bullet, no tricky or hidden secret to parenting. It is simply organizing our love in effective ways.
Published by Random House, 2021
Amazon LinkThere will be a social worker who will tell us there will always be holes in your story, missing pieces we can’t provide. “You won’t be able to tell them what it felt like when they kicked your ribs,” she will say, and I will want to tell her I knew you before I had ribs.
ANTHOLOGIES/MEMOIRS – QUEER
- The Velveteen Father: An Unexpected Journey to Parenthood by Jesse Green. Read an excerpt.
- Choosing Family: A Memoir of Queer Motherhood and Black Resistance by Francesca T. Royster. Read an excerpt.
Published by Villard, 1999
Amazon LinkBut a simple biological birth does not require its authors to fill out forms, to examine their impulses and choose words to describe the indescribable. Adoption does.
Published by Harry N. Abrams, 2023
Amazon LinkI felt an urge then to nestle the top of a small head beneath my chin, to feel another’s milky breath. To know that possessive hold of a child, claiming my arms and hips, a hold so different from a lover’s; to experience that miraculous ability that mothers have to keep holding, despite shaking arms, their already-walking child, against odds and often in uncomfortable spaces, such as airplane aisles and grocery store checkout lines; to carry a child up and down stairs to the bathroom in the middle of the night. As I watched the mother and child, I wanted to be of use in that deep and fundamental way.
NOVELS – YA
- How to Save a Life by Sara Zarr. Read an excerpt.
Published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2012
Amazon LinkI know how much she missed Dad. I missed him, too. And I knew how different our missing him was, and that made it even harder. Couldn’t it just be us for a while, missing him together, in our separate ways? Couldn’t she at least wait until after graduation? Let us get used to each other, the people we are without Dad.