Birthmarks: Transracial Adoption in Contemporary America Book

This is an incredibly hard and boring read! We are in the process of adoption and I grabbed this book at the library hoping to learn as much as I could about adoption, but this book gave me very little insight into the adopted child, adoption life, or parental roles in adoption. Also, I do not feel as though I have grown up in a racist era or area, so I grabbed this book thinking maybe there is something I was missing. The author is a white woman adopted into a white family. Also, she only talks about a time frame over 50 years ago. This makes me feel as though she doesn't really have the life experience or current facts to support any of her opinions. She only interviewed 22 trans-racial adoptees and I felt as though a lot of their quotes could be interpreted as more of an adoption identity issue rather than a race issue. I am totally annoyed at the fact that she throws around her opinion of what terms in an adoption or the relinquishment of a child means, and if I never see a "quoted" word in my life again it will be too soon.

The only good, well thought out parts in this book, are of her own life experiences. I would much rather have read an entire book about her adoption story with her own life experiences than listen to random thoughts she has about everything adoption and society related. I believe that God has driven my husband and me to everything in our life including adoption as part of his plan for us. Also the author said she didn't choose a side on adoption between different races, but from what I read she was pretty clear that people should only adopt children that fit the adoptive parent and birth parents exact mold (i.e. Her birth father was Jewish, so she should have been placed in a Jewish family). By that ideal situation no children would ever be adopted!

In short this book was hard to read, didn't help at all with my adoption, gave me little insight into real current racism, was poorly organized, and seemed very anti adoption. I would not recommend this to anyone and only read half of it before actually getting so upset that I couldn't finish it. I don't really want to finish reading a book that is so negative about adopting children.