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Title: Aarvy Aardvark Finds Hope
Author: Donna O'Toole
Comment: An excellent children's book about loss and grief. Your adopted child deals with loss whether or not they talk about it.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: Abby
Author: Jeannette Caines
Comment: This is the story of Abby's interactions within her adopted family, especially with her brother Kevin who initially gives her a hard time. She is part of a warm and loving black family living in a city apartment.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: Adoption Is for Always
Author: Linda Walvoord Girard
Comment: A 5-year-old girl, Celia, knows she is adopted. But she is confused and angry, and her parents must deal with her many questions in an honest and loving way.
Ages: Ages 4 - 8
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Title: The Adopted One: An Open Family Book for Parents and Children Together
Author: Sara Bonnett Stein
Comment: This photo essay has a text for both adults and children.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: Adoption Stories for Young Children
Author: Randall B. Hicks
Comment: This is a book to help parents discuss adoption with their children and how their family was created through adoption. Five-year-old Ryan learns that a woman who is having a baby may decide that the baby can be better taken care of by someone else.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: Allison
Author: Allen Say
Comment: When Allison realizes that she looks more like her favorite doll than like her parents, she comes to terms with this unwelcome discovery through the help of a stray cat.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: All About Me
Author: Lynn Burwash and Cie McMullin
Comment: All About Me, was written by two adoptive mothers as a tool for adoptive parents who wish to help their young children understand the meaning of being adopted.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: All Together Now
Author: Anita Jeram
Comment: This story is about the Honeys -- Mommy Rabbit, Bunny, Little Duckling, and Miss Mouse. This happy, cross-species crew plays "splashy-sploshy" and "itchy-twitchy, swirly-whirly" games.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: A is for Adopted
Author: Eileen Tucker Cosby
Comment: This Christian-themed alphabet book takes you from "A is for Adopted" to "Z is for Zest for Life."
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: Beginnings: How Families Come to Be
Author: Virginia Kroll
Comment: Six vignettes discuss six different ways that children join families, including by adoption.
Ages: Ages 4 - 8
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Title: Being Adopted
Author: Stephanie Herbert
Comment: A 7-year-old girl tells her adoption story.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: The Best Single Mom in the World: How I Was Adopted
Author: Mary Zisk
Comment: A little girl tells the story of her adoption as her mom has told it to her.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: Carolyn's Story: A Book About an Adopted Girl
Author: Perry Schwartz
Comment: Carolyn's parents adopted her from Honduras when she was a baby. She has a little brother who was also adopted from Honduras. Includes information and resources about adoption.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: A China Adoption Story: Mommy, Why Do We Look Different?
Author: Frances M. Koh
Comment: Four-year-old Laura Shu-Mei wonders why she and her parents don't look the same. Her mom explains about Laura's beginnings in China and tells her the story of how she was adopted.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: Chinese Eyes
Author: Marjorie Ann Waybill
Comment: An adopted Korean girl gets a lesson on how unimportant it is that some people think she is different.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: The Chosen Baby
Author: Valentina Pavlovna Wasson and Glo Coalson
Comment: This book explains to young children the joy and rapture adoptive parents feel when the baby arrives. The couple in the novel adopt one baby and then decide to adopt a second one.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: The Day We Met You
Author: Phoebe Koehler
Comment: Illustrated with pastel crayon drawings, this is the story of Mom and Dad telling about the exciting day they adopted their baby.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: Did My First Mother Love Me? A Story for an Adopted Child
Author: Kathryn Ann Miller
Comment: Morgan asks her adoptive mom if her first mother loved her. Her mother answers Morgan by reading her a letter that Morgan's birth mother wrote to her.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: Emma's Yucky Brother
Author: Jean Little, illustrated by Jennifer Plecas
Comment: Emma finds out how hard it is to be a big sister when her family adopts a 4-year-old boy named Max.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: Families
Author: Meredith Tax
Comment: Six-year-old Angie explores the dizzying number of possible relationships created by marriages, divorces, adoptions and single parenting.
Ages: Ages 4 - 8
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Title: Families are Different
Author: Nina Pellegrini
Comment: Six-year-old Nico and 10-year-old Angelica were adopted from Korea as babies. Nico becomes troubled because her two girlfriends look just like their parents. Finally Nico talks to her mom who tells her all about the many different kinds of families.
Ages: Ages 5 and up
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Title: A Family for Jamie: An Adoption Story
Author: Suzanne Bloom
Comment: Molly and Dan seek the help of an adoption counselor. After the adoption worker tells them about a baby needing a family like theirs, they invite grandparents, aunts, uncles, and friends to welcome Jamie home.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: Happy Adoption Day!
Author: John McCutcheon
Comment: "Happy Adoption Day" is a song for the day a long-awaited child joins an adoptive family and "a family was born," including musical notation so everybody can sing along.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: Heart of Mine: A Story of Adoption
Author: Dan Hojer and Lotta Hojer
Comment: One day, the phone rang in the home of a couple who longed and waited for a child. Their little girl had been born on Valentine's Day in Vietnam.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: Horace
Author: Holly Keller
Comment: Horace becomes bothered that he has fur that is dotted while his relatives all have fur that is striped. He runs away to find a family that looks like him, but he misses his mom and dad and decides to return home.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: How Babies and Families Are Made (There Is More Than One Way!)
Author: Patricia Schaffer
Comment: This book surveys the different ways in which children are conceived, develop, are born, and become parts of families.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: I Love You Like Crazy Cakes
Author: Rose A. Lewis
Comment: For Rose Lewis, the journey to motherhood begins with a letter to Chinese officials, asking if she can adopt from the "big room with lots of other babies." She travels to China to meet her new little girl and take her baby home.
Ages: Ages 6 and up
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Title: I Miss My Foster Parents
Author: Stefon Herbert
Comment: A young boy and his sister love their foster parents. When they learn they are going to be adopted they are upset and frightened. But after they move, they begin to like their new parents and home. They still miss their foster parents and hope they will be able to visit them someday.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: I'd Rather Be with a Real Mom Who Loves Me
Author: Michael Gordon, PhD
Comment: A boy is confused and angry about his placement in foster care, even though he knows his mother was not able to take proper care of him or protect him. He is tired of therapy, though one of his therapists is pretty nice, and he thinks his foster mother is okay. This book does not have a "happy" ending. At the end, the boy is still in limbo.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: Is That Your Sister? A True Story of Adoption
Author: Catherine Bunin and Sherry Bunin
Comment: This book is told from the perspective of a 6-year-old girl who is a member of an interracial family. She expresses feelings about being adopted and not looking like her parents and siblings and reminds the reader that adoption is only one facet of her family's life.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: A Koala for Katie
Author: Jonathan London
Comment: An adopted child reexamines her relationship to her two sets of parents and then adopts a stuffed animal.
Ages: Ages 4 - 8
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Title: Let's Talk About It: Adoption
Author: Fred Rogers
Comment: Fred Rogers reassures children that being in a family means belonging. He encourages children to talk with their parents about their happy and sad feelings concerning being adopted.
Ages: Ages 4 - 8
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Title: Little Flower: A Journey of Caring
Author: Laura McAndrew
Comment: Little Flower, a potted daisy who is neglected by her family, finds help and a new place to stay until the people she was living with can learn how to take better care of her. Includes projects to help the healing process of those in a similar situation.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: The Little Green Goose
Author: Adele Sansone
Comment: Mr. Goose finds an abandoned egg, hatches it, and raises a peculiar green-skinned long-tailed chick, who worries about his identity but comes to recognize that he has a loving parent.
Ages: Ages 4 - 8
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Title: Little Miss Spider
Author: David Kirk
Comment: After Miss Spider hatches, her mother is nowhere to be found. When a maternal beetle offers to take her in, Miss Spider knows her search for Mom is over.
Ages: Ages 4 - 8
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Title: Look Who's Adopted
Author: Michael S. Taheri and James F. Orr
Comment: The book explores the different careers and activities that adopted people have undertaken. The book is narrated by Wendel, a turtle adopted by a family of rabbits. It also includes a place for children to list adopted people that they personally know.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: A Mother for Choco
Author: Keiko Kasza
Comment: A lonely, motherless little bird, Choco, sets out to find his mother. Mrs. Bear finds him crying and asks what a mommy would do for him. As he answers, she holds him, kisses him, sings to him and dances with him. Eventually, Choco accepts Mrs. Bear as his new mommy.
Ages: Ages 4 - 8
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Title: My Special Family: A Children's Book About Open Adoption
Author: Kathleen Silber and Debra Marks Parelskin
Comment: A workbook for children of open adoption to help them understand their relationships with their adoptive parents and birth parents.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: Never, Never, Never Will She Stop Loving You
Author: Jolene Durrant
Comment: The story of a birth mother, Annie, and the baby she placed for adoption.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: Oliver: A Story About Adoption
Author: Lois Wickstrom
Comment: Oliver, a lizard-like animal who has been adopted, is scolded by his father and sent to his room, where he sulks and wonders what his birth parents are like.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: Our Baby from China
Author: Nancy D'Antonio
Comment: Our Baby from China tells the true adoption story of Ariela Xiangwei. The book starts by showing Ariela's new parents coming to China to meet her and to visit her wonderful homeland. Finally, they get to come back home and show off Ariela to all their relatives.
Ages: Ages 4 - 8
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Title: Pinky and Rex and the New Baby
Author: James Howe
Comment: Rex finds out from her mother and father that they are going to adopt a baby boy. Rex decides to spend all her free time helping with the baby, so that her parents will continue to notice and value her. Rex finally figures out that there is enough love in the family for everyone.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: Stellaluna
Author: Janell Cannon
Comment: After falling headfirst into a bird's nest, a baby bat named Stellaluna is raised like a bird until she is reunited with her mother.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: Tall Boy's Journey
Author: Joanna Halpert Kraus
Comment: The grandmother of Kim Moo Young, an 8-year-old Korean boy, dies, and Kim's uncle, a soldier, is not able to care for him. The uncle tells Kim Moo Young that he must be a brave boy, and go on a mission across the sea to live with an American family.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: Tell Me Again About the Night I Was Born
Author: Jamie Lee Curtis
Comment: A young girl asks her parents to tell her again the cherished family story of her birth and adoption.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: This Is How We Became a Family: An Adoption Story
Author: Wayne Willis
Comment: This is the story of a couple who long for a child, of a pregnant woman who is not ready to be a mother, and of the events that bring them together for a happy ending.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: Through Moon and Stars and Night Skies
Author: Ann Warren Turner
Comment: A small Asian boy tells the reader his story of how he needed a bed, poppa, and momma of his own.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: Twice-Upon-A-Time: Born and Adopted
Author: Eleanora Patterson
Comment: This book describes, in simple terms for children, both the biological and social origins of adopted children.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: Two Birthdays for Beth
Author: Gay Lynn Cronin
Comment: Beth's mother explains that adoption is a great way to join a family, but there is only one special day for presents. Beth shows her mother that she understands the most important thing about adoption is love.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: When You Were Born in China: A Memory Book for Children Adopted from China
Author: Sara Dorow
Comment: This book about adopting from China is a photo-essay that provides a child's-eye look, helping to explain some of the whys and hows that have brought these children to their new families.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: When You Were Born in Korea: A Memory Book for Children Adopted from Korea
Author: Brian Boyd
Comment: This book for Korean children adopted by families in the United States tells the story of what their early days in Korea were probably like.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: When You Were Born in Vietnam: A Memory Book for Children Adopted from Vietnam
Author: Therese Bartlett
Comment: Speaking directly to adopted children, this book offers a clear and straightforward explanation of how children in Vietnam are placed for adoption.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
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Title: Why Was I Adopted?
Author: Carole Livingston
Comment: This is a picture book dealing with some of the most frequent questions children ask about adoption. The answers are designed to reinforce feelings of love and self-esteem.
Ages: Ages 6 and up
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Title: Zachary's New Home: A Story for Foster and Adopted Children
Author: Geraldine Molettiere Blomquist and Paul B. Blomquist
Comment: Zachary, a sad kitten, is adopted by geese and finds the adjustment difficult.
Ages: Appropriate for all ages.
