Unfortunately, there are millions of little girls that suffer at the hands of cruel parents. For Carollyne, however, there was no refuge. No family relations that wanted her, no social services to come to her assistance—she was alone. In a house filled with people who took no interest in her, she retreated within herself and stayed there for years. When she ultimately broke free she realized that she didn’t know how to raise her own children. From Canada to Australia and back, Carollyne traveled a road of uneasiness and confusion until she settled into retirement and began writing. The detachment with which Carollyne describes her life is an extraordinary rendering of a mind filled with constant turmoil and regret. Will Someone Please Adopt Me? is a story worth reading.

From the Dust Jacket: On a clear day in March 1926, a middle-aged Irish woman arrived in Boston to retrieve a most unusual package: a baby boy, orphaned by his unwed mother and desperate for the care of a loving family. Christened Will Squires by his adoptive parents, the young boy soon discovers that the reasons for his adoption and the unwarranted kindness of his benefactor, the local judge, are shrouded in mystery.

Struggling to make sense of his origin and identity, Will Squires stumbles upon an even greater mystery—the work of God’s hand in his life. As his horizons broaden through education and travel, Will is exposed to many influential people who shape his character as God guides his destiny. Romance blooms as Will finds his calling and seeks to do the work of God wherever he finds himself.

Enriched with biblical allusions and the author’s own poetry, this biographical account of one man’s incredible journey will delight readers with its fascinating array of characters, wonderful sense of place, and most of all its surprising plot twists. Ultimately, William McDowell seeks to convey the message of God’s unfailing grace, as revealed to an orphan whose life story has become his most treasured testimony.

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About the Author: William H. McDowell was born in America and spent his early life in Canada. After serving in the Canadian Army, he graduated with a bachelor of arts in English literature from the University of Toronto in Ontario, then went on to earn a master of divinity degree in biblical languages and philosophy from Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He received a second master’s in communications from Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. The honorary degree of Litt.D. was later conferred on McDowell by Toccoa Falls College in Toccoa Falls, Georgia.

From the Back Cover: On June 27, 1977, an intruder entered Glensheen, the stately manor built along the Lake Superior shore by Chester A. Congdon, patriarch of one of Duluth, Minnesota’s most generous and respected families. Before leaving with a basketful of stolen jewelry, the intruder used a satin pillow to smother Chester’s last surviving daughter, Elisabeth Congdon, after killing ; the heiress’s valiant nurse, Velma Pietila, by beating . her with a candlestick—crimes set in motion by a hastily hand-written will penned just days before the killings.

For the first time the story of the Glensheen killings and the crimes and trials surrounding Marjorie Caldwell Hagen, Elisabeth Congdon’s notorious adopted daughter, is told through the eyes of former Duluth Police Detective and St. Louis County Sheriff Gary Waller and St. Louis County Prosecutor John DeSanto, the men who led the investigation and prosecution of Marjorie and her husband, Roger Caldwell.

Together with former Duluth News-Tribune crime reporter Gail Feichtinger, DeSanto and Waller bring readers behind the scenes of the most infamous double murder in Minnesota history. The authors frankly discuss their successes and failures in order to explain just how a man who claimed innocence was convicted of two counts of murder and later confessed to the crimes—but was then set free. Feichtinger then reaches beyond the Glensheen killings to follow Marjorie through her convictions for arson and presents evidence that suggests she may have gotten away with murder—tour times.

The authors also offer information never before presented, including evidence that was not brought to trial, previously unpublished photographs of the crime scene, and the results of DNA tests—unavailable at the time of the investigation—which link a key piece of evidence to Roger Caldwell and call into question Marjorie Caldwell’s acquittal.

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About the Author: Gail Feichtinger first researched the Glensheen murders as a crime reporter for the Duluth News-Tribune and Duluth Herald around the time Roger Caldwell bargained for his release. She obtained an exclusive interview following his release from prison by delivering Caldwell a pint of his favorite ice cream. Feichtinger was born in Stamford, Connecticut. She studied journalism at Southern Methodist University and received a B.A. from Carleton College. She has also reported for newspapers in Dallas, Texas, worked as a reporter and producer for Twin Cities Public Television, and was an assistant producer for the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour. Feichtinger obtained a law degree from William Mitchell College of Law in 1996. She now works as an assistant attorney general for the Minnesota Attorney General’s office. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband, Bob Geiger, and their daughters, Alexandra and Elena. This is her first book.

Assistant St. Louis County Attorney John DeSanto prosecuted Roger Sipe Caldwell and Marjorie Caldwell for the crimes at Glensheen. DeSanto—along with his twin brother Will—was born in Duluth, Minnesota. He graduated valedictorian from Duluth Cathedral High School in 1964, received a B.A. in psychology with a minor in political science from the University of Minnesota Duluth in 1968, and—after serving two years in the U.S. Army (one stationed in Germany)—went on to study law at the University of Minnesota, graduating in 1973. Since joining the St. Louis County Attorney’s Office as prosecutor in 1973 (he was named chief criminal prosecutor in 1976), DeSanto has seen only one murder suspect receive an acquittal—Marjorie Caldwell. DeSanto and his wife, Lana, live in Duluth and are the parents of three children, Amy, Abby, and Adam.

As a Duluth Police Department detective, Gary Waller led the investigation of the crimes at Glensheen. Waller was born in Duluth, Minnesota, where he served in the police department for twenty-one years. Waller holds a B.A. in criminology from the University of Minnesota Duluth and an M.A. in management from the College of St. Scholastica. In 1986, he was elected St. Louis County Sheriff; he retired in 1999. He now runs a jail planning consulting business. Like Waller, his father, Donald, served in the Duluth P.D. (for 25 years), as did his uncle Floyd Bowman and brother Roger, Duluth’s current Chief of Police. Waller has two children, Bridget and Sean (a former Duluth police officer now serving in Oklahoma), and two stepchildren, Terry and Kathleen. He and his wife, Mary, live near Kettle River, Minnesota, enjoying time with their five grandchildren.

Claire Cashin was adopted. In her youth, she experienced many personal challenges because her birth mother gave her away. This led her in search of her biological mother. This is a true and very honest account of adoption, search and reunion. It examines in depth how adoption can affect the individual and their loved ones. It does not shy away from the reality of what a reunion can mean and how hard it can be at times, or indeed what joy it can add to peoples lives. The story describes in fascinating detail what the reality can be like for many adopted people and what challenges their families may face as they mature and wonder about the circumstances of their adoption. It attempts to offer advice to anyone considering searching for their own answers, from someone who has gone through the process, made the mistakes, learned some lessons along the way and is still smiling. This book describes the mistakes and triumphs she made along the way and how the news of a new birth family has affected her adopted family in Cork, and changed Claire forever. It gives hope and advice to families who wish to help and understand the dynamics involved in adoption and reunion. About the Author: Claire Cashin lives in County Cork in Ireland. She is adopted and began the search for her birth mother ten years ago. She qualified in hotel management and personnel management, and now works as a legal secretary. This is her first book.

From 1 Man and His Books Blog: Gabriella Naseem Akhtar van Rij was born in Pakistan and given up for adoption and raised in the Netherlands by Dutch parents who were part of the diplomatic corps. And this is her story of growing up, in a world that became foreign to her both culturally as well as emotionally, and navigating the pain of being of another color, another heritage, in a family that tragically, fell apart six years after adoption. But in spite of all of this, van Rij does not appear to bitter or resentful. She becomes a survivor and works to make something of herself as she moves into adulthood. Set against the backdrop of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver as she tells her story to a Dutch journalist, With All My Might is a story that has meaning on various levels. One is the personal level as it relates to van Rij. Another is the challenges and dynamics of an international adoption and the challenges that it brings. A third is the story of cultural tension as van Rij navigates a difficult first marriage in which she feels the heat of prejudice and racism.

From the Back Cover: A Woman Trapped in a Woman’s Body is about the nightmare of ending up being nothing like the woman you had intended on being. Not even remotely. Lauren Weedman’s story is excessive, dangerously self-deprecating, and darkly funny. These are accounts of what happens when you are 36, divorced, possibly barren, and still prone to (accidentally) leaving period stains on your gay roommate’s couch. Weedman’s stories are comical and painfully cringe-worthy. Which is what happens when you’re A Woman Trapped in a Woman’s Body and you can’t get out.

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About the Author: Lauren Weedman made her television debut on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Her plays and one-woman shows have received rave reviews in New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle. She appears on Comedy Central, VH1, and Oxygen.com. She was married but is no longer, and currently lives in Los Angeles.

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By the Same Author: Miss Fortune: Fresh Perspectives on Having It All from Someone Who is Not Okay (2016, Plume). Her one-woman play, Homecoming, was also included in Women Playwrights: The Best Plays of 2002 (2003, Smith & Kraus).

From the Dust Jacket: With the “eloquence of a poet and the gifts of a born therapist” [San Francisco Chronicle], Kim Chernin has, over the course of her career, dedicated herself to the critical issues of women’s development. The Woman Who Gave Birth to Her Mother: Seven Stages of Change in Women’s Lives offers a new paradigm for women’s development as mature, creative, and free adults. Giving birth to one’s mother is a symbolic act of self-creation that opens the door to autonomy and achievement. It is, in fact, a crucial transition in which women finally learn to free themselves.

Chernin explores the stages of change through which women travel, from idealization of the past and revising it; blaming the mother and forgiving her, letting go of her and, ultimately, giving birth to a new self. Chernin’s tales of women’s transformations are arresting and full of depth: one woman, adopted as a child, embarks on a journey to locate her birth mother; another finds the source of a voice that haunts her—the voice of her daughter, given up at birth; a third unlocks her own creative process and paints her way out of a painful symbiosis. Framing these stories is the narrative of Chernin’s relationship with her own daughter and the insights won from three generations of women in her family. The Woman Who Gave Birth to Her Mother is an exciting, necessary book by one of the most original thinkers on women’s lives.

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About the Author: Kim Chernin is the author of such classic works as The Hungry Self, The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness, and In My Mother’s House. Chernin maintains a private consulting practice in Berkeley, California.

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Compiler’s Note: See, Chapter 9: Juana’s Story (pp. 99-119).

From the Dust Jacket: Born as a ward of the state of Maine—the child of an unmarried Yankee blueblood mother and an unknown black father—Victoria Rowell beat the odds. Unlike so many other children who fall through the cracks of our overburdened foster-care system, her experience was nothing short of miraculous, thanks to several extraordinary women who stepped forward to love, nurture, guide, teach, and challenge her to become the accomplished actress, philanthropist, and mother that she is today.

Rowell spent her first weeks of life as a boarder infant before being placed with a Caucasian foster family. Although her stay lasted for only two years, at this critical stage Rowell was given a foundation of love by the first of what would be an amazing array of women, each of whom presented herself for different purposes at every dramatic turn of Rowell’s life.

In this deeply touching memoir, Rowell pays tribute to her personal champions: the mothers, grandmothers, aunts, mentors, teachers, and sisters who each have fascinating stories to tell. Among them are Agatha Armstead, Rowell’s longest-term foster mother, a black Bostonian on whose rural Maine farm Rowell’s fire to reach for greatness was lit; Esther Brooks, a Paris-trained prima ballerina, Rowell’s first mentor at the Cambridge School of Ballet; Rosa Turner, a Boston inner-city fosterer who taught Rowell lessons of independence; Sylvia Silverman, a mother and teacher whose home in a well-kept middle-class suburban neighborhood prepared Rowell for her transition out of foster care and into New York City’s wild worlds of ballet and acting and adulthood.

In spite of support from individuals and agencies, Rowell nonetheless carried the burden of loneliness and anxiety, common to most foster children, particularly those “orphans of the living” who are never adopted. Heroically overcoming those obstacles, Rowell also reaches a moment when she can embrace her biological mother, Dorothy, and, most important, accept herself.

Ultimately, The Women Who Raised Me is a story that belongs to each of us as it shines a glowing light on the transformational power of mentoring, love, art, and womanhood.

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About the Author: At age eight, Victoria Rowell won a Ford Foundation grant to study ballet and later went on to train and dance professionally under the auspices of the American Ballet Theatre, Twyla Tharp Workshop, and the Juilliard School before becoming an actress. She is the founder of the Rowell Foster Children Positive Plan, which provides scholarships in the arts and education to foster youth, and serves as national spokesperson for the Annie E. Casey Foundation/Casey Family Services. Rowell is an award-winning actress and veteran of many acclaimed feature films and several television series, including eight seasons on Diagnosis Murder, and has starred for the past thirteen years as Drucilla Winters on CBS’s #1 daytime drama The Young and the Restless.

A truly unforgettable memoir, Worthy to Be Found, chronicles the joys and obstacles of a Christian adoptee relinquished at birth in the 1960s American South. Deanna was called by God from a young age. Driven to serve, and gifted in music and preaching, she excelled in her calling. She worked hard in her personal life, too. Coming from an adoptive family of divorce, she was determined to create the stable marriage and family she constantly longed for. She had always wondered about her origins, and as she embarked on motherhood, Deanna was compelled to search. But even getting the chance to look her natural mother in the eye as an adult would prove to be an epic emotional and logistical task. Reunion was only the beginning. Readers will be moved to laughter and tears as they journey through the roller-coaster ride of reunion with Deanna’s natural maternal family and later grief at facing further devastation from the woman who gave her life. Time and again, Deanna draws upon her immense personal resilience, her faith in God, and a healthy dose of humor to restore her emotional health. Anyone who wants to move beyond mere surviving to thriving amidst life’s complexities will find hope and healing in the pages of Worthy to Be Found.

Thinking of adopting? Are you an adoptive family and need encouragement? Do you know an adoptive family in your church and want to minister to them more? Within the pages of Woven Together there is deep insight, warmth, and valuable truth for Christians on the adoption journey. Woven Together is a compilation project by Funding Hope whereby 18 authors share and unpack God’s grace and goodness in adoption. Woven Together brings testimonies to life from adult adoptees to birth mothers, domestic and international adoption, special needs to embryo adoption, and each author speaks from their heart as they experienced God move in their family though the gift of adoption. As Christians, we know that God is all about adoption as He has adopted each of us through Jesus. Woven Together explores His love of adoption in testimonies. All authors have donated their writings. All profits will go directly to Funding Hope to provide adoption grants to Christians.

“For every complex problem there is a simple solution, which is wrong!” — George Bernard Shaw. As for this book, this is the true life story of mine. Being adopted ran my life; becoming a mother contained my life. From primordial pain, “Attic law” and problematic inheritance, terrible loss of an adorable adoptive father, hideous adoptive maternal relatives with salacious rants hysterically claiming their stakes from properties, on top of all “epiphanies,” vile and zeitgeist of irrational schadenfreude of psychopath competitors of unhealthy work environments, to final escape in single motherhood, current narrative presents a realistic glimpse into pivotal phases that touch the experiences of an adult adoptee.

The author of this was an orphan in Arkansas. She wrote this book for her grandchildren in Atlanta, GA. The book gives a moving account of growing up in an orphanage in the early 20th century.

From the Dust Jacket: Marcus Samuelsson was only three years old when he, his mother, and his sister—all battling tuberculosis—walked seventy-five miles to a hospital in the Ethiopian capital city of Addis Adaba. Tragically, his mother succumbed to the disease shortly after she arrived, but Marcus and his sister recovered, and one year later they were welcomed into a loving middle-class white family in Göteborg, Sweden. It was there that Marcus’s new grandmother, Helga, sparked in him a lifelong passion for food and cooking with her pan-fried herring, her freshly baked bread, and her signature roast chicken. From a very early age, there was little question what Marcus was going to be when he grew up.

Yes, Chef chronicles Marcus Samuelsson’s remarkable journey from Helga’s humble kitchen to some of the most demanding and cutthroat restaurants in Switzerland and France, from his grueling stints on cruise ships to his arrival in New York City, where his outsize talent and ambition finally come together at Aquavit, earning him a coveted New York Times three-star rating at the age of twenty-four. But Samuelsson’s career of “chasing flavors,” as he calls it, had only just begun—in the intervening years, there have been White House state dinners, career crises, reality show triumphs and, most important, the opening of the beloved Red Rooster in Harlem. At Red Rooster, Samuelsson has fulfilled his dream of creating a truly diverse, multiracial dining room—a place where presidents and prime ministers rub elbows with jazz musicians, aspiring artists, bus drivers, and nurses. It is a place where an orphan from Ethiopia, raised in Sweden, living in America, can feel at home.

With disarming honesty and intimacy, Samuelsson also opens up about his failures—the price of ambition, in human terms—and recounts his emotional journey, as a grown man, to meet the father he never knew. Yes, Chef is a tale of personal discovery, unshakable determination, and the passionate, playful pursuit of flavors—one man’s struggle to find a place for himself in the kitchen, and in the world.

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About the Author: A James Beard Award-winning chef and author of several cookbooks, Marcus Samuelsson has appeared on Today, Charlie Rose, Iron Chef, and Top Chef Masters, where he took first place. In 1995, for his work at Aquavit, Samuelsson became the youngest chef ever to receive a three-star review rom The New York Ties. His newest restaurant, Red Rooster, recently opened in Harlem, where he lives with his wife.

From the Back Cover: My broken spirit is haunted by memories. I have looked from prams to pushchairs to toddlers to adolescents and teenagers, and now to young women, wondering if it is my daughter I’m looking at. Always searching.

The interviews in Yesterday They Took My Baby illuminate and explore all aspects of this often misunderstood subject by giving voice to birthmothers, adoptive children and adoptive parents. Ben Wicks, author of the bestselling book on evacuees No Time To Wave Goodbye, once again shows the pathos, optimism and courage in ordinary people’s lives.

This moving and insightful book will prove invaluable, not only for those involved in this most intensely personal and human of dramas, but also for every parent, future parent and child.

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About the Author: Ben Wicks grew up chiefly in London’s East End, left school at fourteen and had some thirty jobs before settling into journalism. He has travelled widely, covering the wars in Biafra and Ethiopia and the plight of refugees in the Sudan. He is the author of nineteen books and now lives in Toronto.

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By the Same Author: No Time to Wave Goodbye: True Stories of Britain’s 3,500,000 Evacuees (1988, Bloomsbury), among others.

You Be the Judge is a must read for all but especially young adults. Anyone that has been made to feel that they were less than or just not good enough should read this book. It shows what an individual can overcome with determination and the desire to succeed, and when failure, truly is not an option. We have not all been born with the perfect family or come from a childhood with happy and warm memories though I believe that is what we all desire. Some of us had to create those memories on our own because no one was there to do it for us. Most 13-year-old boys beginning their teen years are discovering girls, exploring feelings of love and friendship. Me? My mom, or so I thought she was my mom, was discarding me like I was a shirt she no longer wanted. At 13, I found out I had been celebrating my birthday on the wrong date for the first 12 years of my life. At 13, I was taken to the home of a woman who I was told was my biological mother, where I was taunted and spat at for an entire night. The next day, at 13, I left that stranger’s home and became a man very quickly. At 13, my life began. I’ve been homeless. I’ve been hungry. I’ve been knocked down a lot but always got right back up. I yearned for a real home most of my young life. I even entered WWII at the age of 16 in search of one. I’ve seen a lot in my lifetime, and a lot of it I would like to forget but I always acknowledge that every experience made me the man that I am. Throughout it all I always had hope. This is a story that will remind you with hope and perseverance there is redemption, transformation peace, happiness and true success. I ask you what is the meaning of success. After reading this book you will certainly know and understand how I define that word. Was I a success? You be the judge.

Ann Fisher was adopted at birth in the early 1940s. Her mother Pearl was always open and supportive about Ann’s desire to search for her birth parents, but it took years to complete the search. This is Ann’s story.