Sherry knew that her life would change drastically when she and her husband decided to adopt a baby boy with Down syndrome, and she knew they would struggle at times with his developmental challenges, with other people’s perceptions, and with their own emotions. What she didn’t know was just how amazing their world would become once Charley was in their lives—and in their hearts.

About the Author: Sherry Palmer has been a writer since she was able to hold a pen. Her stories have appeared in Chicken Soup for the Christian Family Soul (HCI, 2000), I’m Glad I’m a Mom (Harvest House Publishers, 2008) and Foliate Oak Online Literary Magazine. Her guest columns have appeared in The Breathitt County Voice, The Tennessee Star Journal, and Monroe Life magazine. A graduate of Spalding University’s Low residency MFA program in Louisville, Kentucky, Sherry studied creative nonfiction with what she calls the greatest mentors and colleagues ever. She currently lives in Knoxville, Tennessee with her husband, Brad, their son, Charley, and their two ill-mannered cats, Gizmo and Gravy Train. Sherry’s latest work, Life With Charley: A Memoir of Down Syndrome Adoption, is the result of a love story, twenty-four years in the making.

The victim of a rare cosmetic condition, Lady Colin Campbell was born a girl but brought up as a boy; she had to wait until the age of twenty-one before receiving corrective medical treatment, and suffered a turbulent and short-lived marriage in the 1970s to the son of the 11th Duke of Argyll, with whom, twenty years later, she was still involved in a legal battle to save the reputation he had sought to destroy. Yet she also enjoyed an idyllic childhood, a glamorous career as a New York model, love affairs with some of the world’s most eligible bachelors and connections with leading members of the royal family, before becoming one of Britain’s most respected international charity organisers, and, more recently, the mother of two adopted Russian children. A true assortment of riches, this is her own candid, poignant and remarkable story.

About the Author: Lady Colin Campbell was born in St. Andrew, Jamaica in 1949, into one of the island’s wealthiest and most influential families. The author of Diana In Private, The Royal Marriages and the Guide To Being A Modern Lady, she lives in Belgravia with her sons, Misha and Dima, and her three dogs.

About the Author: Beth O’Malley spent her first five months in foster care. Her life experiences, as an adoptee and a seasoned adoption worker, enhance her approach to LifeBooks.

By day, Ms. O’Malley helps to create families. In her spare time she helps families to create LifeBooks.

Now, in Lifelines, Lynn Caine addresses the woman—alone or married—who feels lonely and isolated. She describes her search for fulfillment as a single woman, her struggles as a single parent, and the devastating effect which the success of her first book had on her life. With down-to-earth warmth and understanding she discusses the particular problems which women have dealing with loneliness: a loss of a sense of their own worth, depression, self-pity, the fear of success, and that “trapped” feeling. By giving examples from her own life she shows women how to take charge of their lives and offers guidance on how to manage money and business transactions, how to handle love affairs, how to discipline your children, how to develop trust in other women, and enrich your personal life.

A blend of personal testimony, holistic philosophy and practical advice, this is a book by a woman who has lived through the problems she describes and who has learned, slowly and painfully, how to overcome them.

About the Author: Lynn Caine has long been well-known in the New York publishing scene, first as a publicist and now as the author of the best-selling Widow. She is in great demand as a lecturer, teacher, and seminar and workshop leader, and has published articles in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Ms. Caine lives in New York City with her two children. Lifelines is her second book.

By the Same Author: What Did I Do Wrong?: Mothers, Children, Guilt (1985, Arbor House).

Berebitsky reveals that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the rules governing adoption were much less rigid and adoptive parents and families were considerably more diverse. In Like Our Very Own, she chronicles the experiences of adoptive parents and children during a century of great change, illuminating the prominent role adoption came to play in defining both motherhood and family in America.

Drawing on case histories, letters from adoptive parents, congressional records, and fiction and popular magazines of the day, Berebitsky recovers the efforts of single mothers, African American parents, the elderly, and other marginalized citizens to obtain children of their own. She contends, however, that this diversity gradually diminished during the hundred years between the first adoption laws in 1851 and the postwar “baby boom” era. Adoption social theory and practice was gradually transformed into a highly homogenized model that tried to match children to parents by class and background and that ultimately favored conventional middle class American families.

Changing attitudes about adoption, as Berebitsky shows, have also mirrored changing definitions of motherhood. At a time when womanhood and motherhood were socially synonymous, both birth mothers who gave up their children and adoptive mothers seeking a maternal role were viewed as transgressors of the natural order. This eventually changed, but only after proper training and outside expert approval replaced an assumed maternal instinct as the keystone of good mothering. A fascinating chapter in American social and cultural history, Like Our Very Own offers compelling evidence that adoption has always been an important factor in our evolving efforts to define the meaning and nature of both motherhood and family.

About the Author: Julie Berebitsky is assistant professor of history and director of the Women’s Studies Program at The University of the South.

In writing this book twenty years later, Loux is finally coming to terms with the distressing mixture of hope and disillusionment, of love, frustration, and overwhelming guilt that has characterized her relationships with her two daughters. Both young women have settled down in their mid-twenties, but their extended adolescences were a terrifying swirl of school delinquency and dropout, pregnancy, prostitution, and drug abuse. Margey has recently moved from prostitution and drug addiction to steady work and relationships. Although Dawn dropped out of high school and had two children before she was twenty-one, she and her husband have proved to be loving and reliable parents. The ending of Margey’s and Dawn’s stories are as indefinite as anyone’s, but both young women are much more at peace with themselves, and Loux has grown to respect and accept her daughters’ choices.

In The Limits of Hope, Ann Kimble Loux conveys affectingly and disturbingly the social and individual human costs of child abuse and neglect, calling for reforms in the adoption process. She speaks forcefully about the needs of adoptive families and urges adoption agencies to offer continuing support to parents as well as children. She speaks more forcefully still about the obligation of adoption services to disclose fully background information about potential adoptees. Loux presents her cautionary tale not to discourage prospective adoptive parents but to urge them to become more informed. A s much as Loux loves her children, personal experience has led this adoptive mother to challenge the notion that a stable home environment is always the best answer for abused or neglected kids. This is a candid and moving account of a woman coming to terms with her younger, naive self and of the limits of hope.

About the Author: Ann Kimble Loux is Professor of English at Saint Mary’s College in South Bend, Indiana.

At the age of five Kira moved permanently to live with Mia and her family, but by the time she was nine years old the whole family was at breaking point.

Can Mia really help this lost and damaged child?

About the Author: Mia Marconi has an Italian father and an Irish mother. She grew up in London and has been a foster carer here for over 20 years. During that time she has welcomed more than 250 children into her home. To protect the identities of people she is writing under a pseudonym.

By the Same Author: Learning to Love Amy (2014); A Child Called Hope (2014); and If Only He’d Told Me (2014.

He did not seem to Cindy like the Perfect Man. Ian, with his bad-boy ways, struck her as someone whom she absolutely did not want as a husband, but he soon proved his worth with wit, warmth, a series of spectacularly cooked meals, and a marriage proposal made on a beautiful beach, the prospective groom perched heroically on a white stallion.

Unable to resist the romance, Cindy married him and settled in contentedly for the long and gratifying happily ever after ... or so she thought. Being a wife, Cindy discovers soon enough, is not so different from being a girlfriend, only now you have a permanent houseguest. Ian’s endearing quirks became impossible-to-ignore and slightly irksome habits; what was once charming adventurousness now seems like recklessness (just why was he rappelling down the side of a building on a garden hose?); and his impossibly big heart has space enough for an impossibly big dog, a St. Bernard that looks, as Cindy realizes once it has taken possession of her home, “like a person in a dog suit.” And then there’s all his stuff.

The Longest Date is the wonderfully funny, and ultimately, deeply moving story of a marriage, of the daily negotiations and accommodations about matters like cooking, holidays, space, money, and sex that every (newly or otherwise) wedded couple faces in the course of figuring out exactly who they are together and where they are headed. Cindy and Ian’s own ongoing courtship takes a surprising turn when they decide to have a baby—a plan that turns out to be far more complicated than they ever could have anticipated and that tests and strengthens their love for each other.

The perfect companion for anyone navigating a marriage (or even just contemplating one), The Longest Date marks the welcome return of one of our most gifted and captivating comic writers.

About the Author: Cindy Chupack has won three Golden Globes and an Emmy for her work as a writer/executive producer of HBO’s Sex and the City. She also wrote for Everybody Loves Raymond, Coach, and a bunch of series only her parents would watch. She has written about dating and relationships for many magazines and had her own column in Glamour and O, The Oprah Magazine. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, her St. Bernard, and ... you’ll just have to read the book.

But many do not move on to adoption as these children did. It is a widely known fact that black and mixed heritage children in the care system wait longer than any others for a permanent family, and some never find one. Why is this? Is there a genuine “shortage” of prospective adopters coming forwards, i.e. a recruitment issue? And if so, are there reasons for this? Or is it something else?

This inspiring collection looks at the experiences of nine adoptive families and their children. It explores their motivation to adopt, what their social workers had to offer (or not), the roles of their friends and family, and what adoption has meant to them. Told in the first person, these absorbing stories offer pointers to what can make for a successful adoption and, equally, the things to avoid.

Essential reading for anyone considering adopting a child, especially those from minority ethnic communities, and for social services professionals concerned to recruit and retain black adopters.

About the Author: Hope Massiah is a writer and adoptive mother. Her stories and poems have been published in a number of anthologies including IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain (Penguin, 2000), Bittersweet (Women’s Press, 2000) and Playing Sidney Poitier (Saks Media, 1999). Hope has also worked as a secondary school teacher, voluntary sector manager, freelance trainer and management consultant. Hope now writes mainly for the theatre and was Theatre Royal Stratford East’s Writer in Residence for 2004.

On August 2, 1993, Robby and Jan DeBoer were forced to give up the little girl that they had raised, since infancy, for two and a half years. In a decision that shocked the entire country, the courts ruled that Jessi DeBoer was to be taken from the only parents and the only home she had ever known and given back to the biological parents who were virtual strangers to her.

How do you say goodbye to your daughter?

Losing Jessica is more than the story of a court battle. This is Robby’s own story—of the hopes and dreams with which she and Jan began their marriage, and of the tremendous struggles that followed. Robby eloquently describes what it was like to meet her daughter for the first time, after years of trying to adopt. We feel her elation at the moment when she and Jan are awarded custody of the baby at the termination hearing, and we feel her pain and distress when she learns that the man who had signed the adoption papers might not be Jessi’s biological father after all. Robby’s story highlights the complications and inequities of a legal system that places the biological rights of birth parents above those of the adoptive parents—and makes decisions without regard to the best interests of the child. Above all, Losing Jessica is the story of a mother’s unequivocal love for her child, the strongest, most compelling, and most unbreakable human bond of all.

About the Author: Robby DeBoer is a spokesperson for the DeBoer Committee for Children’s Rights, a nonprofit, nationwide organization with headquarters in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Its aim is to encourage legislative and judicial reform with regard to the protection of children and to find effective ways to channel the energies of interested citizens and mobilize them for action on behalf of children’s rights. Robby lives with her husband, Jan, in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

About the Author: Dr. Robert Collis is one of Europe’s leading paediatricians. He is Director of Paediatrics to the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin, Physician to the National Children’s Hospital and a faculty member of Dublin University. During the war he was on a committee in London considering the problems of civilian medical help which would arise after the invasion of Europe. This led him to Europe with a group of his Irish doctor friends and, eventually, to Belsen where he met Eva and László.

In addition to forty-odd medical papers, Dr. Collis has published an autobiography, The Silver Fleece, and a number of plays. One of these, Marrowbone Lane, moved audiences to such an extent that they formed a foundation to support Dr. Collis’ social work. This fund provided meals for some 500,000 poor sick children during the war and helped to build Fairy Hill Hospital, one of the most perfect of its kind.

Dr. Collis and his wife have two sons of their own in addition to Eva and László, who are now health adolescents of 12 and 15.

Each year, thousands of foreigners travel to China to bring home a child, who is, for the adoptive family, a blessing beyond measure. But the exchange has a dark side: almost all the children filling the orphanages of the world’s most populous nation are girls, found tucked in doorways or bundled on park benches. For every daughter placed in waiting arms, countless others are left behind to unknown fates.

In The Lost Daughters of China, Evans explores the emotional and political complexities of an international phenomenon that creates families across the boundaries of culture and geography. She describes the trying but often comic intercontinental journey in which she and her husband—guided by an adoption coordinator known fondly as “Saint Max,” and armed with high hopes and powdered formula—trekked with seventeen other families from Hong Kong to the Pearl River Delta to meet their daughters.

At once a compelling personal narrative and an evocative portrait of contemporary China, this book investigates the country’s legacy of lost daughters. Evans casts light on an important untold story, delving into the underpinnings of an age-old cultural preference for boys, the machinations of the one-child policy, and the growing pains of modern China. In a sensitive and moving look at the unprecedented mixing of two cultures, she deftly weaves together the tales of the children themselves with the mystery of their anonymous Chinese families who remain in the shadows.

Illuminating the real-life stories behind the statistics, The Lost Daughters of China is an unforgettable account of the red thread that winds from China’s orphanages to hearts around the globe.

About the Author: Karin Evans has been an editor for numerous publications, including Outside, Rocky Mountain Magazine, the San Francisco Examiner’s Sunday magazine, Health, and Hippocrates, and spent two years as a stringer for Newsweek’s Hong Kong bureau. Evans lives with her husband and their daughter in San Francisco.

Written as an “e-mail diary,” Love and Loss is based on e-mails Bay sent out immediately after Namgyal died, replies she received from her dearest friends, e-mails from Namgyal’s brothers (one in Tibet and one in India, before and after Namgyal’s death) and e-mails that she and Namgyal exchanged during the last two years of Namgyal’s life. Brief narratives interwoven throughout the e-mails complete the story.

About the Author: Jane Bay has worked at Lucasfilm Ltd. in Marin County, California, for twenty-nine years. She is currently working on two other books: Growing Up Southern: Stories from the Attic of Childhood Memories and an anthology of short stories entitled The Magic of New Mexico.

Love and Mayhem is an honest and open account of the struggles, sadness and joy that comes with the job of being a parent to a traumatised child. From the sleepless nights with babies withdrawing from drug-addiction, to the heartbreak when a child moves on to another home, and the loving chaos times that come with a large and blended family, John DeGarmo fights for the many children who have come through his home.

About the Author: John DeGarmo is a proud foster and adoptive parent who has fostered over 40 children. He regularly speaks on his experiences at conferences and training sessions, and is dedicated to improving and promoting successful foster and adoptive care systems. He is the author of The Foster Parenting Manual: A Practical Guide to Creating a Loving, Safe and Stable Home, Keeping Foster Children Safe Online: Positive Strategies to Prevent Cyberbullying, Inappropriate Contact and Other Digital Dangers and of A Different Home: A New Foster Child’s Story with Kelly DeGarmo, all published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers, as well as his first memoir, Fostering Love: One Foster Parent’s Journey. John lives with their foster and adoptive children in Georgia, USA.

You will gain insight into the pain of a traumatic childhood, Attention Deficit Disorder and the world of drugs and street life. You will learn some creative solutions for connecting in difficult relationships. Sound guidance in the form of fourteen lessons is provided for changing relationship dynamics. For those entering the “real world” after jail or recovery, transitional information and direction are offered. Most of all you will be shown how to turn hope into loving action. We can all grow and learn from relationships.

About the Author: Patricia Morgan began life in rural Ontario where she met and married her teen sweetheart, Les Morgan. After careers as an Early Childhood Educator and parent Education Facilitator, Patricia returned to school in 1984 to completed a masters degree in Humanistic and Clinical Psychology. She has worked as a family therapist, career counsellor and consultant to parents of acting out teenagers. In 1999 she became a Certified Integrative Body Psychotherapist and has a counselling practice in Calgary, Alberta.

Patricia has created and delivered dozens of courses and workshops dealing with parent education, family dynamics, women’s issues, self esteem and the value of a light hearted lifestyle. She is increasingly being invited to conferences as a keynote or seminar speaker.

As an accidental writer she is grateful for the gifts that have come from revealing the story of her relationship with her daughter, Kelly. Patricia is also mother to Benjamin and Katie and grandmother to Kelly’s two children, James and Danielle. Patricia is vibrantly alive and happily connected to her loved ones ... most days.

Kelly Morgan has been in addiction recovery for over five years participating in a number of programs. Since her Attention Deficit Disorder diagnosis she has become informed and better skilled at managing it. She now works at balancing being a student at the University of Windsor with being a single parent mom to her two children, James and Danielle.

She has also become a supportive source to others who are entering the recovery process or who are beginning to make healthy changes in their lives. While there are some days she still struggles with life challenges, Kelly most often celebrates her new accomplishments and blessings.

By the Same Author: Adoption and the Care of Children: The British and American Experience (1998, Institute of Economic Affairs) and Adoption: The Continuing Debate (1999, Institute of Economic Affairs).

Still an active correspondent, Tucker crisscrossed the continent, filing stories about the uprisings in the Congo, the civil war in Sierra Leone, and the post-genocidal conflict in Rwanda. He witnessed heartbreaking scenes of devastation and violence, steeling him further to take a personal role in helping anywhere he could. At home in Harare, Vita was nursing Chipo back to health. Soon she and Tucker decided to alter their lives forever—they would adopt Chipo. That decision challenged an unspoken social norm—that foreigners should never adopt Zimbabwean children.

Raised in rural Mississippi in the sixties and seventies, Tucker was familiar with the mores associated with and dictated by race. His wife, a savvy black woman whose father escaped the Jim Crow South for a new life in the industrial North, would not be deterred in her resolve to welcome Chipo into their loving family.

As if their situation wasn’t tenuous enough, Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe was stirring up national fervor against foreigners, especially journalists, abroad and at home. At its peak, his antagonizing branded all foreign journalists personae non gratae. For Tucker, the only full-time American correspondent in Zimbabwe, the declaration was a direct threat to his life and his wife’s safety, and an ultimatum to their decision to adopt the child who had already become their only daughter.

Against a background of war, terrorism, disease, and unbearable uncertainty about the future, Chipo’s story emerges as an inspiring testament to the miracles that love—and dogged determination—can sometimes achieve. Gripping, heartbreaking, and triumphant, this family memoir will resonate throughout the ages.

About the Author: Neely Tucker, a reporter for the Washington Post, was born in Lexington, Mississippi. He has reported from more than fifty countries or territories in Africa, Europe, the Mideast, and the nations that compose the former Soviet Union, frequently covering war and violent conflict. He, Vita, and Chipo live in Washington, D.C.

Marcelle Clements • Laura Shaine Cunningham • Christina Frank
Jesse Green • Melissa Fay Greene • Doug Hood • Pamela Kruger
Jenifer Levin • Antoinette Martin • Jacquelyn Mitchard
Adam Pertman • Emily Prager • Amy Rackear
Bonnie Miller Rubin • Dan Savage • Bob Shacochis
Jill Smolowe • Sheila Stainback • Joe Treen • Jana Wolff

Representing a broad spectrum of life and featuring twenty leading writers, all of whom are adoptive parents, A Love Like No Other reflects the diversity of American families that have come together through adoption. From the personal experiences of single parents and same-sex couples to those who have participated in domestic as well as international adoptions, these stories offer vivid and beautifully rendered snapshots of the parenting experience. By turns humorous, sobering, provocative, joyous and all refreshingly honest A Love Like No Other introduces the reader to a complex, emotional, candid, and wholly recognizable look at the new American family.

About the Author: Pamela Kruger is a contributing editor at Child magazine, a writer and editor whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Fast Company, Redbook, and other publications. She lives with her husband and their two children in New Jersey.

Jill Smolowe is the author of the adoption memoir An Empty Lap: One Couple’s Journey to Parenthood. An award-winning journalist, she is currently on staff at People. She lives with her husband and their daughter in New Jersey.