"YOU SHOULD BE GRATEFUL"

A transracial adoptee makes a case for reimagining norms and assumptions embedded in adoption policy and practice.

Tucker, executive director of the Adoptee Mentoring Society, layers her personal history with research and anecdotes from her roles as adoption caseworker, workshop facilitator, and mentor for transracial adoptees. This interlacing creates a rich texture that reflects the complexity of the opportunities and challenges faced by adoptees—particularly children of color adopted by White families in White communities. The author’s own narrative of searching, finding, and maintaining relationships with members of her birth family provides a resonant background for her analysis of the systemic inequities surrounding adoption and the racism underlying transracial adoption’s inflection points. However, the ease, grace, and dynamism that Tucker has shown behind microphones and on camera does not fully translate to her writing. The tense changes too often, gaps in narrative details create confusion in chronology and setting, and some of her anecdotes undermine key points. For example, despite framing the book as one about transracial adoption, one of Tucker’s most frequently referenced case studies is about a family that refused to adopt outside their own White race. Still, the author’s passion for and knowledge about the topic are extensive, and her story is a compelling context against which to wrestle with themes of belonging, autonomy, family, and agency. If she struggles to find literary footing, that struggle also reveals how adoption’s problems have no clear heroes or easy, final answers. As she notes, “writing honestly about adoption seems to inevitably hurt someone or to risk being misconstrued.” By engaging with these complexities, making space for conflicting truths, and handling her subject and its characters with empathy, Tucker emerges as a promising and determined voice poised to lead the change she calls for in the adoption industry.

A captivating memoir that also offers an important counterpoint to voyeurism and saviorism in the adoption process.