Book Review: Rooted In Adoption

A Collection of Adoptee Reflections

by Breaux, V., & Kilgore, S. (2020)

Reviewed by Kayla Harr Doucette

In Rooted in Adoption: A Collection of Adoptee Reflections, adoptees Veronica Breaux and Shelby Kilgore bring together the voices of 47 adoptees to discuss how adoption has impacted their lives. As an adoptee, I found this collection at turns revelatory, challenging, and affirming. Without exception, these adoptees’ stories are important, and I am grateful to the authors for curating and sharing them. Rooted in Adoption ultimately underscores the need to center adoptee voices, hold space for the wide and varied range of adoptee experiences, and foster sustained conversation among those impacted by adoption.

Significant variation across the contributors’ one- to two-page reflections forms an important strength of the book. Some adoptees describe heinous abuse and neglect in their adoptive homes, while others express gratitude that they were placed with loving parents; some view adoption as opportunity, a second chance, or an expression of love, while others associate it with trauma and loss. Reading these reflections through the lens of my own adoption, I experienced startling moments of recognition. The deep similarity of some of these adoptees’ sentiments to my own prompted me to reexamine how the effects of adoption have manifested in my personality, relationships, and identity. I also found eye-opening statements that helped expand my understanding of others’ adoption experiences, not only in narratives that differed greatly from my own, but also in those that described circumstances quite similar to mine. For me, this was one of the most valuable insights the collection provided: Even when we have faced similar circumstances, adoptees’ interpretation of and response to those experiences vary greatly. Thus, making room for an abundance of adoptee voices and allowing those individuals to tell their own stories, as this collection does, is essential.

Rooted in Adoption succeeds most as a starting point for further conversation and a call to listen to adoptees advocating for change in how adoption is practiced and discussed. At times, while reading, I felt frustrated by the lack of opportunity for contributors reflecting on similar issues to engage with one another’s ideas. Reflections that appear side by side sometimes include statements that directly contradict each other. This variation is important, but it also emphasizes the need for conversation that readers will not find in the pages of this collection. While facilitating that discussion is not within the scope of this project, there was something dissatisfying about reading 47 self-contained reflections rather than seeing their ideas put into productive conversation with one another. I found myself reading the book in short bursts to avoid becoming overwhelmed by what sometimes felt like a litany of open wounds, brief submersions into the struggles of individuals whose complexities far exceed the few paragraphs I spent with them.

These are understandable limitations, particularly if the authors prioritized bringing as many adoptee voices to the page as possible and letting their stories speak for themselves. However, the book would have benefitted from a discussion of methodology that explicated such priorities and helped shape readers’ expectations. More information on how these reflections were gathered and the choices the authors made in presenting them could productively shape readers’ engagement with the collection. Quotations that appear as epigraphs above each reflection also prompt questions about editorial intervention. Drawn from public figures, authors, and fictional characters, these quotations relate to family, identity, and personal growth, but they are frequently and woefully general, and at times verge on being tone deaf in relation to the contributions with which they are paired. Epigraphs I found particularly distracting include “Family is not an important thing. It’s everything,” attributed to Michael J. Fox, and the line “There’s no place like home,” a cliché spoken by Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. If the contributors chose these quotations themselves, knowing that was the case would significantly impact my interpretation of how the epigraphs interact with the text. As it stands, the epigraphs feel too generic to meaningfully frame the complex and intimate narratives they accompany.

While the contributions are anonymous, each lists the writer’s racial identity, gender identity, current age, age when adopted, place of birth, and type of adoption. The contributors range from 10 to 69 years old, and their birthplaces include 19 U.S. states, Canada, China, Ireland, Poland, and South Korea. Most were adopted between birth and age two, though several reflections come from adoptees who were placed with adoptive families as older children, and some reflect on their experiences in foster care. Notably, the voices in this collection overwhelmingly identify as female; of the contributors, 37 identify as female, nine as male, and one as nonbinary. White and Korean adoptees are also much more heavily represented than others, though I recognize that the racial categories listed in the book may collapse multiple identities into one label for some contributors.

The final two adoptee reflections of the collection (which I surmise were provided by Kilgore and Breaux themselves based on the authors’ statements that close the book) take two different approaches to accentuating the importance of creating opportunities for adoptees to speak about their experiences. In the penultimate contribution, “Adoption on Film,” the writer explains that she has benefitted from sharing her own and other adoptees’ stories through film, calling that storytelling a “healing experience” through which she “continue[s] to gain insight.” The final reflection of the book, “Suffering in Silence,” is one of the collection’s shortest entries, a brevity that emphasizes the void of adoptee voices that have been suppressed. Its writer describes the pain of being expected to “pretend like nothing ever happened” and bear the loss of adoption in silence. Regardless of whether they were provided by the authors, these last two reflections aptly sum up the aims and exigence of Rooted in Adoption, a collection that invites adoptees to find solace and empowerment in telling their stories and to build community through shared experience.

Kayla Harr Doucette is a transracial adoptee who grew up in Salem, Oregon. She is an academic advisor and Ph.D. candidate in English literature at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she studies visual perception, objects, and identity in modernist literature.