Set in the meticulously planned community of Shaker Heights, this novel ignites when a custody battle erupts over a Chinese-American baby.
The conflict pits a wealthy white adoptive mother against the child's immigrant birth mother, forcing the entire town to confront complex questions about motherhood, privilege, and what truly constitutes a family.
This novel follows Victoria Jones, a young woman who has aged out of the foster care system, her emotional life shaped by years of abandonment and instability. Unable to form trusting relationships, she communicates through the Victorian language of flowers.
The story is a sensitive portrayal of how the trauma of foster care enduring and how one survivor cautiously builds a new life and finds a way to heal.
Anne Tyler’s novel begins at a Baltimore airport where two very different families arrive to meet their newly adopted daughters from Korea.
This shared experience sparks a decades-long connection, allowing Tyler to explore contrasting approaches to parenting, cultural assimilation, and the complex ways adopted children navigate their heritage and sense of belonging.
Drawing from the real-life historical scandal of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, which kidnapped and sold poor children to wealthy families, this novel weaves together past and present.
It follows the harrowing story of the Foss siblings, who were stolen from their family, and a modern-day woman who uncovers the devastating secret of her own parentage, exploring the profound and lasting consequences of adoption fraud.
This novel intertwines the story of Vivian, an elderly woman who was sent from New York City to the Midwest on an orphan train as a child, with that of Molly, a troubled teen navigating the contemporary foster care system.
Their unlikely friendship bridges generations, revealing shared experiences of displacement, loss, and the enduring search for identity and a place to call home.
This beloved classic tells the story of Anne Shirley, a spirited and imaginative orphan who is mistakenly sent to live with an aging brother and sister who had intended to adopt a boy.
Anne’s arrival transforms their quiet lives in unexpected ways, creating a heartwarming and enduring story about how an adoptive child can forge a new family and find unconditional love and acceptance.
When a young woman named Taylor Greer flees her rural Kentucky home, she unexpectedly becomes the caretaker of an abandoned Cherokee child she names Turtle.
This informal, sudden adoption forces Taylor to confront the legal and emotional complexities of motherhood, as she forms a powerful bond with the traumatized child and builds an unconventional but loving support system.
Centering on Homer Wells, an orphan who grows up at the St. Cloud’s Orphanage in rural Maine, this epic novel directly confronts the realities of orphanhood.
Raised by the orphanage's director, Dr. Larch, Homer’s entire life is defined by his search for identity, family, and a moral code outside the only home he has ever known, making it a profound exploration of belonging and chosen family.
After her mother is imprisoned for murder, Astrid Magnussen embarks on a painful odyssey through a series of Los Angeles foster homes. Each new placement presents a different challenge and a new lesson in survival.
The novel is a visceral, unflinching look at the instability and emotional turmoil of the foster care system and one young woman's fierce struggle to forge her own identity.
After his mother is killed in a museum bombing, 13-year-old Theo Decker is taken in by the wealthy family of a school friend, creating a temporary but formative adoptive home.
The novel follows Theo through subsequent displacements—from living with his deadbeat father in Las Vegas to finding a surrogate family in an antique shop owner—exploring grief, loss, and the search for belonging in the wake of tragedy.
This classic young adult novel introduces Gilly Hopkins, a fiercely intelligent and defiant 11-year-old who has bounced around the foster care system.
Determined to be reunited with her birth mother, Gilly schemes to make her new placement with the eccentric Maime Trotter unbearable, only to find herself slowly forming the first real family bonds of her life.
The archetypal story of an orphan’s search for family, this novel follows its young protagonist from the deprivation of a parish workhouse to the dangerous criminal underworld of London.
Oliver’s journey is a relentless quest for identity and belonging, serving as a powerful social critique of how Victorian society treated its most vulnerable, abandoned children.