Monroe Free Library

In this deeply moving and myth-shattering work, Ann Fessler brings out into the open for the first time the astonishing untold history of the million and a half women who surrendered children for adoption due to enormous family and social pressure in the decades before Roe v. Wade. An adoptee who was herself surrendered during those years and recently made contact with her mother, Fessler brilliantly brings to life the voices of more than a hundred...

A novel about what defines family and the lengths we will go to protect our children.

"In America, Mother = White. That's what Nefertiti, a single African American woman, discovered when she decided she wanted to adopt a Black baby boy out of the foster care system. Eager to finally join the motherhood ranks, Nefertiti was shocked when people started asking her why she wanted to adopt a 'crack baby' or said that she would never be able to raise a Black son on her own. She realized that American society saw motherhood through a white...

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 myth. Nicole believed that her biological parents had made the ultimate sacrifice in the hope of giving her a better life, that forever feeling slightly out of place was her fate as a transracial adoptee. But as she grew up - facing prejudice...

In exchange for a bad debt, an Anglo-Dutch trader takes on Florens, a young slave girl, who feels abandoned by her slave mother and who searches for love--first from an older servant woman at her master's new home, and then from a handsome free blacksmith.

"Between 1854 and 1929, so-called orphan trains ran regularly from the cities of the East Coast to the farmlands of the Midwest, carrying thousands of abandoned children whose fates would be determined by luck and chance. This is the story of one such child. As a young Irish immigrant, Vivian Daly was sent by rail from New York City to an uncertain future a world away. Returning east later in life, Vivian leads a quiet, peaceful existence on the coast...

"'Your situation is always ambiguous, isn't it, Guido?', his father-in-law, Count Orazio Falier, observes of Donna Leon's soulful detective, Guido Brunetti, at the beginning of her superb 28th Brunetti novel, Unto Us A Son Is Given . 'The world we live in makes that necessary,' Brunetti presciently replies. Count Falier was urging his Venetian son-in-law to investigate, and preferably intervene in, the seemingly innocent plan of the Count's best friend,...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the beloved, Pulitzer Prize–winning author comes "an intimate picture of middle-class family life" (The New York Times) that challenges the notion that home is a fixed place, and celebrates the subtle complexities of life on all sides of the American experience.
Two families meet at the Baltimore airport while waiting for their baby girls...

Applying for an open adoption after several unsuccessful years of trying to conceive, Jesse and Ramon are disheartened by the bureaucratic labyrinth of red tape, training sessions, and approvals they endure.

"About a couple desperately waiting to bring their adopted child home and a young mother about to make the biggest decision of her life"--