Here are 100 books that Surviving the White Gaze fans have personally recommended if you like
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As a Korean transracial adoptee, it seems like I’ve always been thinking about family, or even if I didn’t want to, other people’s intrusive questions about my family makeup forced me to. More than solely thinking about my own family–whether my Korean biological family or my white adoptive family–it led me to be curious about the broader systems, policies, and practices behind something that seems so personal and private. It’s no surprise that I formalized my inquiry into the social world by becoming a sociologist and professor. As a sociologist, my primary research interests are race, identity, and belonging, and yes, Korean transnational transracial adoption is part of that focus.
I love exploring the idea of how life might be completely different if… if I had made different choices, if my parents had made different choices, if something seemingly inconsequential had or hadn’t happened.
Shannon’s book took me on a fantastical journey into her own imaginings of the alternate lives she could have had as an adoptee, and by extension, it made me think about the possibilities for my own life differently. As adoptees, sometimes we don’t allow ourselves the luxury of even imagining these possibilities; Shannon’s book offered a safe space to do just that.
Dream Country author Shannon Gibney returns with The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be, a book woven from her true story of growing up as a mixed-Black transracial adoptee and fictional story of Erin Powers, the name Shannon was given at birth, a child raised by a white, closeted lesbian.
At its core, the novel is a tale of two girls on two different timelines occasionally bridged by a mysterious portal and their shared search for a complete picture of their origins. Gibney surrounds that story with reproductions of her own adoption documents, letters, family photographs, interviews, medical…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I am adopted. For most of my life, I didn’t identify as adopted. I shoved that away because of the shame I felt about being adopted and not truly fitting into my family. But then two things happened: I had my own biological children, the only two people I know to date to whom I am biologically related, and then shortly after my second daughter was born, my older sister, also an adoptee, died of a drug overdose. These sequential births and death put my life on a new trajectory, and I started writing, out of grief, the history of adoption and motherhood in America.
Chung was born and adopted five years after me, also in Washington state. Like me, she wrestled her whole life with feelings of shame and discomfort around her adoption. Unlike me, Chung is a woman of color, adopted into a white family in a super-white town where she stood out like a sore thumb. Unlike me, Chung took the brave step, before having her own children, of searching for her birth family.
While I read this vulnerable and beautifully written memoir, I felt like I was walking with Chung on her journey as an adoptee and mother, all the while wishing I could be as brave as Chung. This is a truly inspiring story.
This beloved memoir "is an extraordinary, honest, nuanced and compassionate look at adoption, race in America and families in general" (Jasmine Guillory, Code Switch, NPR)
What does it means to lose your roots—within your culture, within your family—and what happens when you find them?
Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. From childhood, she heard the story of her adoption as a comforting, prepackaged myth. She believed that her biological parents had made the ultimate sacrifice in the hope of…
I was raised as one of two white kids in a large, multiracial adoptive family by loving parents who wanted to change the world. Our parents were thoughtful about adoption, ambitious about the symbolism of our family, and raised us all to be conscious about race, to see it, and to guard against it. But the world is a lot bigger than our house and racism is insidious and so, in a way, we all eventually got swallowed up. So I started thinking hard about the dynamic relationship between race and adoption and family when I was just a kid, and I’ve never really stopped.
When I picked up this book at a local bookstore in Indiana, I knew that it was going to take me places – the cover photo of two adorable children, one white and one black, standing in front of a yellow school bus told me that.
Julia Scheeres’s parents adopted an African American child her age named David, and the two became inseparable. Their extraordinary story – their intense commitment to each other as they move through dystopian settings ranging from the bleakness of rural Indiana to a strict religious reform school in the tropical Caribbean – was inspiring.
And the jaw-dropping ending of the book just broke me into pieces.
"A page turner . . . heart-stopping and enraging . . . focused, justified, and without a trace of self-pity. Shot through with poignancy." ––New York Times Book Review
Over a decade after its first publication, Jesus Land remains deeply resonant with readers. Now with a new preface by the author, this New York Times bestselling memoir is a gripping tale of rage and redemption, hope and humor, morality and malice―and most of all, the truth: that being a good person takes more than just going to church.
Julia and her adopted brother, David, are sixteen years old. Julia is…
Stealing technology from parallel Earths was supposed to make Declan rich. Instead, it might destroy everything.
Declan is a self-proclaimed interdimensional interloper, travelling to parallel Earths to retrieve futuristic cutting-edge technology for his employer. It's profitable work, and he doesn't ask questions. But when he befriends an amazing humanoid robot,…
I was raised as one of two white kids in a large, multiracial adoptive family by loving parents who wanted to change the world. Our parents were thoughtful about adoption, ambitious about the symbolism of our family, and raised us all to be conscious about race, to see it, and to guard against it. But the world is a lot bigger than our house and racism is insidious and so, in a way, we all eventually got swallowed up. So I started thinking hard about the dynamic relationship between race and adoption and family when I was just a kid, and I’ve never really stopped.
I should have read this book years ago. This singularly brilliant memoir is an undoing of the most pernicious adoption myth: that which traces the success of adopted children to their new families.
In this case, a bright and talented young woman makes it out of the foster system before eventually going to Penn and becoming an accomplished journalist and professor, but her adoption out of foster care turns into yet another traumatic experience.
Ambitiously, Patton spins that trauma outward, expanding the background until it spans centuries. When, by the close, she makes the start of a career for herself, that triumph is pretty much hers alone.
An astonishing coming-of-age memoir by a young woman who survived the foster care system to become an award-winning journalist On a rainy night in November 1999, a shoeless Stacey Patton, promising student at NYU, approached her adoptive parents' house with a gun in her hand. She wanted to kill them. Or so she thought. No one would ever imagine that the vibrant, smart, and attractive Stacey had a childhood from hell. After all, with God-fearing, house-proud, and hardworking adoptive parents, she appeared to beat the odds. But her mother was tyrannical, and her father turned a blind eye to the…
I’m fascinated by our connections to animals, our similarities and differences, and how we communicate. Large mammals have always been my favorites, but like many people, I started noticing birds in my backyard during the pandemic lockdowns. As an author of middle-grade novels, my stories have been inspired by something interesting I’ve learned about a particular animal. I started writing my novel after learning that whooping cranes had nested in Texas for the first time in over a century. I knew I had to give that momentous nest sighting to a bird-loving girl who’d appreciate the visitation by these rare and majestic birds!
This book has so many of my favorite things—laughter and tears on the same page, a character with a strong connection to an animal, and a funny, caring, resilient kid who’s wrestling with a difficult decision.
I enjoy seeing characters who cause their own problems, like Coop does when he derails his basketball plans by climbing a tree to check out a bird's nest! I also love it when antagonists aren’t villains; Coop and his family might be at odds about what he should do with his mockingbird, but they’re loving parents and grandparents.
I cheered for Coop to discover where he fits in, and he's a character I’ll remember long after closing the book.
Coretta Scott King Honor winner Brenda Woods's poignant, heartfelt story of an adopted boy and the bird he rescues
Everyone expects Coop to be musical like his beloved parents, but he's not. That's one of the few things he finds awkward about being adopted-well, that and the fact that he sometimes wonders why his birth mother didn't love him enough to keep him. This summer, he's stuck at home with a broken arm after falling out of a tree trying to get a closer peek at a mockingbird nest. Later, when the eggs in the nest have hatched and the…
As a Korean transracial adoptee, it seems like I’ve always been thinking about family, or even if I didn’t want to, other people’s intrusive questions about my family makeup forced me to. More than solely thinking about my own family–whether my Korean biological family or my white adoptive family–it led me to be curious about the broader systems, policies, and practices behind something that seems so personal and private. It’s no surprise that I formalized my inquiry into the social world by becoming a sociologist and professor. As a sociologist, my primary research interests are race, identity, and belonging, and yes, Korean transnational transracial adoption is part of that focus.
I vaguely remember hearing about the tragedy of the Hart children–six Black and mixed-race children who were adopted out of foster care and killed by their two white adoptive mothers. I wasn’t aware of all of the intricate details of their case or the foster care system that allowed this to happen.
I am in awe of Roxanna’s investigative journalism and the nuance and empathy in which she tells this story. While it is the Hart story that’s at the center of this book, I learned so much more about the child welfare system overall and how it’s set up to promote child separation. Heartbreaking.
“A riveting indictment of the child welfare system . . . [A] bracing gut punch of a book.” ―Robert Kolker, The Washington Post
“[A] moving and superbly reported book.” ―Jessica Winter, The New Yorker
“A harrowing account . . . [and] a powerful critique of [the] foster care system . . . We Were Once a Family is a wrenching book.” ―Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
The shocking, deeply reported story of a murder-suicide that claimed the lives of six children―and a searing indictment of the American foster care system.
Nature writer Sharman Apt Russell tells stories of her experiences tracking wildlife—mostly mammals, from mountain lions to pocket mice—near her home in New Mexico, with lessons that hold true across North America. She guides readers through the basics of identifying tracks and signs, revealing a landscape filled with the marks…
Parenting books bore me. I don’t like reading instruction manuals, and don’t have time to weigh others’ opinions about how to raise my kids. But when I read books about motherhood forged in self-reflection and told with literary elegance, I become a more self-reflective parent and have the eyes to see beauty in my ordinary maternal experiences. Books like this are few and far between. It’s hard for mothers to make art; when our resources are spread thin in parenthood, why do work that may not pay? How to find time for creative rumination? But here’s a list of books written by mothers who persisted in their creative work to show us motherhood in all of its mundanity, mania, and magic.
In my reading, I seek to surround myself with experiences of motherhood that are different from my own. In this memoir, Sarah Sentilles tells the story of fostering a child with the hopes of adopting her while shedding light on the injustices and inefficiencies of the American foster system.
I loved the tender descriptions of maternal love and the way that Sentilles writes about maternal grief. While chronicling her experience of loving a child that isn’t her own, she urges all of us to extend mother-like love beyond our own families, even to the children of strangers.
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • “A powerful, heartbreaking, necessary masterpiece.”—Cheryl Strayed, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Wild
The moving story of what one woman learned from fostering a newborn—about injustice, about making mistakes, about how to better love and protect people beyond our immediate kin
May you always feel at home.
After their decision not to have a biological child, Sarah Sentilles and her husband, Eric, decide to adopt via the foster care system. Despite knowing that the system’s goal is the child’s reunification with the birth family, Sarah opens their home to a flurry of social…
I don’t know how much of who we are is determined by genetics, and how much is from the environment, but I enjoy using characters and stories to explore the question. My scientific and medical background allows me to pull from my training, clinical patients, and scientific studies to create stories that explore characters who are at the precipice of a problem and need to fight against their inner beliefs to learn who they truly are. It’s like a chess game, moving the pieces around the board to see which side will win!
I love the title, and the story takes off immediately after.
Three siblings, all put up for adoption, who have different families and meet for the first time as teenagers. I love how Benway explores the importance of blood relatives and how, most times, a found family may be more important.
But it’s the characters of this novel that are the true stars. They are emotionally raw and, at times, heartbreaking individuals who learn about who they are.
WINNER OF THE U.S. NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2017 FOR YOUNG PEOPLE'S LITERATURE!
'Sometimes, family hurts each other. But after that's done you bandage each other up, and you move on. Together. So you can go and think that you're some lone wolf, but you're not. You've got us now, like it or not, and we've got you.'
When 16 year-old Grace gives up her baby for adoption, she decides that the time has come to find out more about her own biological mother. Although her biological mum proves elusive, her search leads her to two half-siblings she never knew existed.…
I’m fascinated by these themes – love, France, mystery, women’s lives, war, and peace. My parents took me to France when I was 12 and I’ve spent years there in between and go back whenever I can. I started reading in French when sent to be an au pair in Switzerland when I was 17. My own novel, The Lost Love Letters Of Henri Fournier was absorbing to write as it contains all of the above. I found an unpublished novel of Fournier’s in a village in rural France a few years ago and decided I had to write about him and his lover, Pauline, who was a famous French actress.
Although it begins in California, this novel develops into a story set in France. Two sisters, separated by their father after a violent incident, search for each other and eventually connect via a French recluse, whose life one sister is researching. I love Michael Ondaatje’s writing and this book in particular for its daring sweep of geographical and emotional territory.
It is the 1970s in Northern California. A farmer and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, work the land with the help of Coop, the enigmatic young man who lives with them. Theirs' is a makeshift family, until they are riven by an incident of violence - of both hand and heart - that 'sets fire to the rest of their lives'. This is a story of possession and loss, about the often discordant demands of family, love, and memory. Written in the sensuous prose for which Michael Ondaatje's fiction is celebrated, "Divisadero" is the work of a master story-teller.
The Bridge provides a compassionate and well researched window into the worlds of linear and circular thinking. A core pattern to the inner workings of these two thinking styles is revealed, and most importantly, insight into how to cross the distance between them. Some fascinating features emerged such as, circular…
I am an adoptive mom twice, both in open arrangements where we maintain lifelong contact with our children’s birth moms and birth dads. My husband and I had little guidance to navigate the complexity of raising adopted children. I do not want others to be ill-prepared, as fortunately for the children, most adoptions today are open. We followed our instincts and looking back, we got a lot right, but we sure could have used some help with the tougher challenges. I am beyond grateful for my journey and I write to give back by sharing our story to help others who come after me.
This book is the ONE book that would have helped me the most in the early days after I brought my adopted baby home from the hospital. My beautiful, healthy three-day-old baby was unhappy, fussy, and cried all the time. Little did I know that she was missing her birth mom. I was told by the adoption counselors that this baby was a clean slate, and I would do all the loving and nurturing and could raise her as if I gave birth to her.
Verrier explained so much about how the wound that my child still carries with her today affects her behaviors. And she also gave me hope and insights that acknowledging the wound can lead to healing and hope even when the trauma cannot be erased.
The Primal Wound is a seminal work which revolutionizes the way we think about adoption. It describes and clarifies the effects of separating babies from their birth mothers as a primal loss which affects the relationships of the adopted person throughout life.. It is a book about pre-and perinatal psychology, attachment, bonding, and loss. It gives adoptees, whose pain has long been unacknowledged or misunderstood, validation for their feelings, as well as explanations for their behavior. It lists the coping mechanisms which adoptees use to be able to attach and live in a family to whom they are not related…
