Customer Reviews

Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption

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This collection will break your heart and then mend it again. The contributors are brilliant, unflinching, angry, proud, grieving, recording, resisting, transforming, and organizing. There hasn't been a book like this in the history of adoption, let alone transracial adoption, but hopefully there will be many more like it in the future.

I am an adult Korean adoptee and I am so grateful for this book. It doesn't explicitly pronounce judgment on adoption, but instead it represents its history, consequences & controversies through anecdotal evidence by adoptees themselves. These adoptee writers are diverse, representing countries from Korea to El Salvador, and professions from clinical psychology to poetry. The juxtapositions of critical analysis to poetry to personal essay is truly complimentary in that the factual is not favored hierarchically over the mythological and imaginative narrative. Adoptees' constructions of such narratives are often more revealing of the "reality" of adoption than any well researched account.

From experience, I know that as an adoptee it is often difficult to convey the experiences of immigration and assimilation-an obstacle that is compounded by attitudes from more traditional immigrant communities (I am Asian American, but not quite) and the attitudes of the social infrastructure that considers the Asian adoptee archetype as "well-adjusted" and "practically white"-which is why this book is so important. It represents the adoptee experience in all its multi-faceted joy and sorrow and offers a voice when one's own feels stifled.

I have recommended this book to all of my immediate family and I believe that it should be required reading for any potential adoptive parent. This book has taught me how tragically lax prerequisites to adopt are and how important global consciousness and race education should be in the decision making process. It also stresses the need to redirect the adoption debate to its core by fixing the political and social systems leading to adoption rather than fretting about the ethical/unethical aftermath. This book is a crucial component for changing the tide of current attitudes towards adoption.

This book provides an excellent insight into the special needs of transracially adopted children. The world needs love, and adoption provides that, but the children need understanding about their needs before and after adoption. I found it enlightening.

this book is a right proper thing to read for a person who wishes to more understand the feelings of adoptees as they are moved at the behest of someone with far more power than they.