Molly's Reads

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ADOPTION

ANTHOLOGIES/MEMOIRS
  • A Love Like No Other: Stories from Adoptive Parents Edited by Pamela Kruger and Jill Smolowe.
  • Published by Riverhead, 2005

    Amazon Link

    Only 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.

  • Instant Mom by Nia Vardalos.
  • 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.

  • Chasing Kites: One Mother’s Unexpected Journey Through Infertility, Adoption, and Foster Care by Rachel McCracken.
  • Published by Rachel McCracken, 2018

    Amazon Link

    There is no magic bullet, no tricky or hidden secret to parenting. It is simply organizing our love in effective ways.

  • Stranger Care: A Memoir of Loving What Isn’t Ours by Sarah Sentilles.
  • Published by Random House, 2021

    Amazon Link

    There 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.
  • Published by Villard, 1999

    Amazon Link

    But 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.

  • Choosing Family: A Memoir of Queer Motherhood and Black Resistance by Francesca T. Royster.
  • Published by Harry N. Abrams, 2023

    Amazon Link

    I 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.
  • Published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2012

    Amazon Link

    I 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.