“Happy Life is starting from this moment” This slogan is written on the wall of the Chinese adoption bureau of Chongqing. It is quite applicable to the seventeen-month-old toddler, De Xing Fu. She grows up as a happy-go-lucky kid in Goes, a town in Zeeland, under the Dutch name, Yanina. After a couple of years she wonders where she is from and wishes to see her birthplace, Fuling. In 2010, together with her adoptive parents, she makes an unforgettable trip to her birthplace. Meeting her nurses and the assistant manager of the home, she discovers the truth of the home’s device: “Love has no borders.” She is fully aware she cannot dismiss the chance she got to make something of her life.

A visiting American professor in Taiwan finds a newborn abandoned in a railway station. He and his wife, who are childless, adopt the baby. This act of human kindness sparks a providential chain of events that leads the couple to the discovery of their own Jewish heritage.

In 2003, social worker Lori Richardson purchased a one-way ticket to Guatemala. She planned to fulfill her lifelong dream to provide volunteer service throughout Central America. While in a Guatemalan orphanage, her plans changed when she met Ana, a child with a zestful smile, stifled by chronic illness and a mysterious secret. When the free-spirited traveler tried to adopt the girl she had grown to love as a daughter, she encountered a resistant, dark force that refused the child’s freedom. Tiny Ana made an enormous impact on Lori and she vowed to overcome the obstacles that endangered both their lives. Becoming Mamacita chronicles this miraculous journey and places the reader beside Lori as she corresponds with family and friends concerning her triumphs and struggles in Guatemala. Through mango-scented breezes, soft Mayan textiles, steamy waterfalls and chaotic chicken bus rides around winding cliffs, Ana discovers life is more than oppression; Lori learns it is more than restless freedom. During this three-year odyssey, Lori becomes a Mamacita, a Guatemalan mommy—until an unforeseen event separates mother and child. It is only through the culturally rich experiences and the fierce trials of living in Guatemala that they both find what they are searching for.

A family looks and sees empty places everywhere—at their kitchen table, on the family’s swing set and in their arms. Someone is missing. They find out about a little girl who needs a family. They go to find her and bring her home, and all of their empty places are filled. A wonderful story of adoption! About the Author: Druid H. Joyner thinks there is nothing better than a good story and has been telling and writing stories her whole life. She tells this particular story with great joy since it is a story she has lived! She and her family live in Charleston, SC.

From the Back Cover: Written by an adoptive mother and an adoptee daughter, Before You Were Mine offers a unique Christian perspective on creating a Lifebook that commemorates your child’s birth story. Complete with worksheets and advice from adoptive families, you’ll find that remembering and celebrating your child’s history can be fun, rewarding, and even redemptive.

You’ll discover how to uncover and organize details of their birth story, make the story both truthful and positive, and use the Lifebook to trace God’s faithfulness.

This powerful concept takes the guesswork out of how and when you’ll talk about your adopted child’s beginnings and offers him or her a lasting memento that helps them overcome uncertainty and fear to rest in Christ’s unconditional love. How will you embrace your child’s birth story as part of God’s plan? Before You Were Mine will help you relax and rejoice in the beautiful story God is writing for your child.

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About the Author: Susan TeBos (M.A., Western Michigan University) is the mother of three adopted children from Siberia. She has led many workshops for adoptive organizations and for adoptive ministries in churches. She and her husband, Michael, and their children live in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Carissa Woodwyk is a Korean adoptee. She has a master’s degree in counseling and psychology and is a lisensed counselor and marriage and family therapist in private practice. She also serves as a pastoral care assocaite at Mars Hill Bible Church in Grandville, Michigan. She lives with her husband in Hudsonville, Michigan.

Being a Mother: How I Adopted Three Children from Three Different Places in the World tells the story of a woman who found it was difficult have a child. After many fertility treatments, she and her husband decided to go on an exhausting journey, filled with optimism and hope for a life with children. The couple went to different places throughout the world to adopt children, but on their way they encountered various obstacles, threatening to shatter their dreams. This book is a diary that documents—with honesty and sensitivity—the moments when the couple adopted their three children and the events that preceded those moments. The book is a true story. It is surprising, exciting, touching, and filled with unexpected twists. About the Author: Ronit Redlich lives in the Israeli town of Arad. She has worked for many years in education, guiding teachers and moderating parents’ groups.

In July of 2009, my wife Robin, our son Benjamin and I went on a journey to China to adopt a little girl. Her Chinese name was Zhu Zheng Hong, which means Pearl Rainbow. We named her Bella Dora, which means Golden Beauty. This is her story.

Isabel Huggan’s acclaimed belonging is pure pleasure to read—richly entertaining, beautifully written, laced with gentle humour and valuable insights acquired during years of world travel. Beginning as a memoir and concluding with three, short stories, Belonging illuminates the mysterious manner in which chance and choice together shape our lives. At the book’s core is Isabel Huggan’s stone house set among vineyards in the foothills of the Cévennes mountains in the south of France, from where she contemplates the meaning of home and the importance of remembrance.

From the Dust Jacket: In Between Light and Shadow veteran journalist Jacob Wheeler puts a human face on the Guatemalan adoption industry, which has exploited, embraced, and sincerely sought to improve the lives of the Central American nation’s poorest children. Fourteen-year-old Ellie, abandoned at age seven and adopted by a middle-class family from Michigan, is at the center of this story. Wheeler re-creates the painful circumstances of Ellie’s abandonment, her adoption and Americanization, her search for her birth mother, and her joyous and haunting return to Guatemala, where she finds her teenage brothers—unleashing a bond that transcends language and national borders.

Following Ellie’s journey, Wheeler peels back the layers of an adoption economy that some view as an unscrupulous baby-selling industry that manipulates impoverished indigenous Guatemalan women, and others herald as the only chance for poor children to have a better life. Through Ellie, Wheeler allows us to see what all this means in personal and practical terms—and to understand how well-intentioned and sometimes humanitarian first-world wealth can collide with the extreme poverty, despair, misogyny, racism, and violent history of Guatemala.

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About the Author: Jacob Wheeler is a freelance journalist, editor at TheUptake.org, and publisher of the Glen Arbor Sun (Michigan). His writings have appeared in In These Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.

Kevin Kreutner is the father of two children from Guatemala and the chief writer for the popular GuatAdopt.com website.

From the Dust Jacket: Parents who adopt children internationally have to grab for a firm handhold on a swinging pendulum of child raising advice. Should they act as if they are color-blind or bolster their child’s racial identity? Should they help their child assimilate to the adopted culture or leap full force, as a family, into the child’s birth culture? The best adoption agencies scramble to provide their clients the truth-of-the-moment. Child psychologists and other professionals weigh in as experts on what that truth ought to be. Eager parents seek each other’s support on the Internet. Adult adoptees have much to say, but some of their testimony troubles new parents. Seldom heard are older, seasoned parents, who tend to withdraw from the discussion as their children grow and develop their own interests.

Cheri Register, the mother of two adult daughters adopted as infants from Korea, and the author of the highly regarded book Are Those Kids Yours?, offers that crucial voice of experience in Beyond Good Intentions: A Mother Reflects on Raising Internationally Adopted Children. Her boldly written essays question the conventional wisdom, calling attention to ten choices well-meaning parents make that turn out not to serve adopted children’s needs as well as one might expect. Register calls for a frank and intimate conversation about the distinct challenges of raising children adopted across national, cultural, and, often, racial boundaries. By avoiding pat answers that fall short of families’ real needs, she affirms the hard work and loving devotion that parenthood demands.

Beyond Good Intentions is a coffee table book of a different sort: a diary-sized volume to keep handy and read as you sip your coffee. You will likely catch yourself nodding and frowning just as you would at a candid friend who urges you to reconsider ideas you have taken for granted, to listen without defensiveness to what your children and other adoptees want to tell you, and to think more deeply about what international adoption requires of the “lucky” parents who benefit from it.

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About the Author: Cheri Register, the mother of two adult daughters adopted from Korea in infancy, is a writer and a teacher of creative writing. She is best known to adoptive families for her book, Are Those Kids Yours?: American Families with Children Adopted from Other Countries, which addresses the ethical questions raised by international adoption. Her other books currently in print are the award-winning Packinghouse Daughter: A Memoir and The Chronic Illness Experience: Embracing the Imperfect Life (originally titled Living with Chronic Illness: Days of Patience and Passion). She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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By the Same Author: “Are Those Kids Yours?”: American Families with Children Adopted from Other Countries (1990, The Free Press), among others.

From the Dust Jacket: The images won’t die—South Vietnamese women and children scrambling desperately toward helicopters; North Vietnamese tanks crashing through walls, roaring through the streets of Saigon—the end of an era.

In a war as tragic as any we have known, the victims were numberless. And the most innocent, the most vulnerable, were the children. Beyond the Babylift is the story of one of those children.

He was the son of a black American GI and a South Vietnamese woman. Raised in the black-market streets of Vietnam, he was taken to an orphanage and later sent to the United States. Here he was eventually placed with a white American couple, Pamela and David Purdy, who offered him love and chose him as their fourth child.

Beyond the Babylift is Pamela Purdy’s valiant effort to “put flesh on our struggle to be a family.”

Her extraordinary diary begins: “The babylift from Vietnam had been in full swing for about a month, and every day thousands of children were being flown to all parts of the country. Couples with active, approved applications for U.S. adoptions were telephoned by Friends of Children of Vietnam to see whether they would consider a Vietnamese child. Our call came on Thursday, May 15.”

That is only the beginning of a story you will never forget—a story of America, of a war, and of one remarkable American family. And of people who choose to pick up the pieces and go on, loving one another in the aftermath of a terrible human tragedy.

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About the Author: Pamela Chatterton Purdy is a visual arts specialist in Brookline, Massachusetts. She and her husband, David, have four children: Kristen, Jessica, Ronald, and Stephen.

From the Publisher: Big Hearted gives you an inside look into the triumphs, struggles, joys and sorrows of ordinary families with generous hearts. It invites you to witness extraordinary love in ordinary moments like the simple cooking of a meal or the hug between a teenaged brother and his baby sister. Just like your family, these families experience pain, setbacks, and challenges. And just like your family, they also experience love and immeasurable blessing through their commitment and care for each other. In this book, you will learn the story of:

• A father of seven healthy boys who struggled to love his Down syndrome baby girl

• A mother of twelve who learned an important lesson about Christmas from her children

• A special relationship between a teenaged brother and his infant sister

• Two grandparents in their final days who inspired their grandchildren in simple ways

• Two orphan children from Kenya who prayed for adoption by an American family and got what they asked for!

It has been said that God cannot be outdone in generosity. The stories in these pages will show you how big hearted families experience this truth in a myriad of ways, sometimes miraculously.

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About the Author: Patti Maguire Armstrong is a correspondent for Our Sunday Visitor newspaper and the National Catholic Register, and works in marketing for Teresa Tomeo Communications. She is an award-winning author and was the managing editor and co-author of Ascension Press’ bestselling Amazing Grace series. Her latest book is Big Hearted: Inspiring Stories From Everyday Families. She has appeared on EWTN, Catholic TV, Fox & Friends, and numerous radio programs across the country. Patti studied a year of journalism at University of Detroit, has a B.A. in social work and an M.A. in public administration, and worked in both those fields before staying home to work as a freelance writer. She and her husband met in the Peace Corps in the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, were Jesuit Volunteers on an Indian Reservation, and spent three years as house parents of a group home for delinquent boys. They now live in North Dakota where they are still raising the tail end of their ten children.

This book was born out of the author’s doctoral research based on her investigation of the inner world of adopted Korean children. This groundbreaking study reveals the inner thoughts and feelings of transracially adopted children by Caucasian families in the U.S. In the author’s words: “My experiences with them furnished me with many insights. I learned about the special meaning of physical differences and why being teased or ridiculed becomes a crisis. I came to understand behaviors such as the tendency to overeat, to hoard food, to refuse to speak Korean, to shun other Koreans, and to be extremely conforming. I also found the significance of the tension generated by the words ‘Korea’ and ‘Korean.’ ” Although written in the mid-1980s, there is much here still relevant to our understanding of how adoption affects the transracial/transcultural adoptee. Recommended for those who like somewhat more academically oriented research.

The account of a British family’s trip to China to adopt a baby boy.

In Blessings from China, author Roberta Diggs takes you on a journey halfway around the world on her mission to rescue two abandoned girls. You will laugh and cry as you follow the moving experience of two first-time parents in their forties. A poignant memoir about the reality of adoption, spiced with humor and the blessings of God. Blessings from China is sure to warm your heart and inspire your soul.

From the Dust Jacket: In 2004 genetic testing revealed that Masha Gessen had a mutation that predisposed her to ovarian and breast cancer. The discovery initiated Gessen into a club of sorts: the small (but exponentially expanding) group of people in possession of a new and different way of knowing themselves through what is inscribed in the strands of their DNA. As she wrestled with a wrenching personal decision—what to do with such knowledge—Gessen investigated the landscape of this brave new world, speaking with others like her and with experts including medical researchers, historians, and religious thinkers.

Blood Matters is a much-needed field guide to this unfamiliar and unsettling territory. It explores the way genetic information is shaping the decisions we make, not only about our physical and emotional health but about whom we marry, the children we bear, even the personality traits we long to have. And it helps us come to terms with the radical transformation that genetic information is engineering in our most basic sense of who we are and what we might become.

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About the Author: Masha Gessen is a journalist who has written for Slate, Seed, the New Republic, the New York Times, and other publications, and is the author of two previous books. She lives in Moscow.

Born in Kansk Russia, Alexei Damiovovich was thrown out of a window on a frigid Siberian night. He was 22 months old. Neighbors found him and took him to the local orphanage where he lived until we arrived to bring him home to America. Adoption is not an easy process. Adjusting to a new member of the family is equally as hard. Add to that the special needs of that child and you have chaos. This story is about my son’s adoption process and his journey to become a productive member of society. Alexei’s journey has not been an easy one, but it has had its lighter moments. This story is my attempt to capture the most memorable moments of the twelve years he has been with us. Alexei will get a certificate of completion from high school in 2008. Then he begins another journey. — Mary Beth Mohr

Adoption Training for Parents and Professionals. This training will help you understand bonding and attachment issues and gives you practical suggestions to identify and address Bonding and Attachment issues in your child. Visit our website at www.AdoptionTrainingOnline.com for information about Certified Training for The Hague International Adoption requirements and Continuing Education Credits for Professionals.

From the Dust Jacket: On March 24, 2001, American writer Kari Grady Grossman entered a crowded orphanage outside Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and met her 8-month-old son. One of the first questions Kari asked was “How did he get here?” The complex and at times heart-wrenching answer is told in this magnificent book encompasses Kari’s personal journey to adoption, Cambodia’s gruesome history of war and genocide, and the stories of two Cambodians—one who escaped the Khmer Rouge’s bloody reign and one who did not.

The interweaving stories grab your heartstrings and do not let go. From the moment Kari realizes that she will never be an “earth momma” practicing prenatal yoga to years later as Kari wends her way on the back of a moto-taxi through Phnom Penh’s smog-choked streets trying to make a difference in her son’s birth nation, you can’t read impassively. Bones That Float takes you into the Khmer Rouge jungle where boy soldiers force starving families to labor all day at gunpoint, and it brings you to modern-day Phnom Penh streets where foreign pedophiles purchase the innocence of preteen Cambodian girls. But ultimately Bones That Float—a Cambodian phrase for the sacred that rises above the suffering—is a tale of hope. Kari reminds us that our world is “one big family” and that we cannot—or dare not—turn our backs on people who suffer in part because of our country’s own foreign policy missteps. To read Bones That Float is to open your heart to caring.

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About the Author: Kari Grady Grossman has spent nearly two decades traveling, writing, and producing documentaries. Her writing has appeared on Discovery Channel Online, including cover age of a Mount Everest expedition and the Alaskan Iditarod. After traveling to Cambodia in 2001 to adopt their son, the Grossmans created the Grady Grossman School. Proceeds from this book will support the school, which now educates nearly 500 children a year. In 2006, she and her husband traveled to India to adopt their second child. A book on that country is forthcoming. The author is a 1990 graduate from Syracuse University and resides in Fort Collins, Colorado.

From the Dust Jacket: She always gets the last laugh—usually at her husband’s expense.

I do try to be considerate. Some years ago when we had a 12-seater van and about ten school-age children plus several preschoolers, I thought with all those kids underfoot, Bonnie really ought to have a vacation, lest she get burned out. I said to her “Bonnie, you’re getting burned out. You really need some relaxation. You need a little rest. Why don’t I watch things here at the house, you throw a few things into the van that you might need for a few days—Take the kids and go.”

This is a story about a serene, mysterious, and slightly eccentric woman—and her slogging, well-intentioned husband. She knows her husband is totally enchanted with her, and she blithely takes advantage. He bears his scars reasonably well. Both of them were profoundly influenced by their 21 children, who came from a dozen different cultural backgrounds.

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About the Author: Fred Cappuccino, born in 1926, was a professional musician for eleven years as an autoharpist at a geriatric wing of a hospital in Cornwall, Ontario. One day he was entertaining patients, strumming autoharp chords and singing his heart out with Beautiful Dreamer, wake unto me, when suddenly one dear sister screeched, “Will someone PLEASE let that cat out!” Fred’s musical career deteriorated somewhat from that point.

He is a retired Unitarian minister, having served ten congregations in his long ministry. The first ones were Methodist, followed by Unitarian. He had to leave three of them due to illness—the people were sick of him.

Fred is the highly respected author of the quarterly “Bonnie Lore” column in the Child Haven International newsletter, the most eminent, erudite and educational newsletter in Canada.

Born in Africa, Conceived in Heaven is the story of one man’s journey to fatherhood, a journey that took Dan to many unexpected places and experiences that stretched him as a person, a husband and a Christian. Dan readily admits that there were many times he “could not see the path forward.” If not for a profound sense that God was calling so directly to adopt John and Nya, Dan says the only logical thing to do would have been to give up. Praise God that we walk by faith and not by logic alone. If you are a Christian, regardless of your Church, you’ll enjoy Dan’s search for God’s will in the midst of his family’s search to be a family. If you are not a believer, you’ll be surprised at the organic rather than didactic manner in which Dan searches for and finds the role of God in his journey. Dan’s original intention was to write this for his children. They are the primary audience in this series of journal entries. John and Nya, this is really your book. Thanks for sharing it with the world!

From the Back Cover: Craig Juntunen appeared to have it all. He sold his company at the age of 40, and set out to live the good life of retirement. But he soon began to feel something was lacking. When a friend told him the story of adopting two girls from Haiti, Craig’s emptiness gave way to a sense of adventure. On a trip to the desperate Third World nation, a country wracked by poverty, corruption and kidnappings, his self-serving lifestyle began a very profound transformation. At an orphanage outside of Port-Au-Prince Craig encountered Espie, Amelec and Quinn. Even after decades of table-pounding declarations he would never have children, at 51 Craig became a dad. This inspirational story of an unexpected journey and personal transformation will say many things to different people. But for all it delivers a powerful reminder of our responsibility to reach out and be there for kids.

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About the Author: Craig Juntunen’s life experience can be broken into three distinct eras ...

In his early life he was involved heavily in athletics, playing quarterback for a total of 14 seasons. He finished his athletic career as a quarterback in the Canadian Football League. He was elected into the State of Idaho Athletic Hall of Fame and the University of Idaho Hall of Fame.

His experience as a leader on the football field led to his developing into an entrepreneur. He successfully built and sold a company with a very successful track record and temporarily retired.

His experience as a quarterback and as an entrepreneur blended together to form philanthropic passions. He has been involved in many charitable giving efforts, and until recently his most notable achievement was launching the Chances for Children foundation.

In May 2010 he started the Both Ends Burning Campaign, a project to change the landscape of international adoption. He and his wife Kathi live in Scottsdale, Arizona with their three children, Amelec, Espie and Quinn. Craig is a recognized expert on international adoption and a frequently sought out public speaker.

From the Dust Jacket: RUSSIA 1990: A boy named Vanya, afflicted with cerebral palsy, is born prematurely. Eighteen months later, he is abandoned by his mother and sent to a bleak orphanage: called Baby House 10. And so the nightmare begins...

This is the story of John Lahutsky, the boy from Baby House 10, whose childhood—but not his will to survive—was cruelly taken away from him. Once inside the state-run orphanage, he entered a nightmare world he was not to leave for more than eight years.

Confined to one room with a group of silent children, he was ignored by most of the staff and labeled an “imbecile” and “ineducable” by the authorities. He was consigned, for a time, to a mental asylum, where he lived in a high-sided, iron-barred crib, lying in a pool of his own waste, on a locked ward surrounded by screaming children and psychotic adults. But even these dire surroundings didn’t destroy the spirit of this remarkable little boy. Vanya grew into an intellectually curious, verbally complex youngster who reached out to everyone around him.

The first person he touched was a young Russian woman named Vika. The second was Sarah, the wife of a British journalist who was living in Russia. They both knew instantly that Vanya was no ordinary child and had been cruelly misdiagnosed. Immediately, they began a campaign to find him a home. After many twists, turns, and false starts, Vanya came to the attention of a single woman living in the United States named Paula Lahutsky. After a lot of red tape and more than one miracle, Paula adopted Vanya, brought him to the United States, and gave him a home of his own. It was there, in his new home, in a different country, that Vanya started his new life and embraced a new name—John—the English translation of Vanya. John Lahutsky is now an honor-roll student at Freedom High School in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and a member of both the Boy Scouts of America and the Order of the Arrow, the BSA’s national honor society. In The Boy from Baby House 10, Alan Philps helps John Lahutsky tell his story, the inspiring true-life saga of a small boy with a big heart and an unquenchable will to survive that will be an inspiration to everyone who reads it.

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About the Author: Alan Philps is an experienced foreign correspondent who has worked for Reuters and The Daily Telegraph, UK. He lives in London with his wife, Sarah.

John Lahutsky is a high school student who lives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, with his mother.

From the Back Cover: Bravo Your Life is a collection of creative nonfiction vignettes about life, family, and friendship in contemporary South Korea. As Korean American adoptee author Mi Soon Burzlaff slowly acculturates herself into her birth family and society at large, her writing opens an illuminating window into Seoul’s raw and dynamic identity.

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About the Author: Mi Soon Burzlaff lives in New York, where she and Joanne Kim are starting an organic kimch’i company. She still visits Seoul regularly.

Bringing Lucy Home shares the compelling drama of one family’s relentless pursuit to bring hope into the life of an orphaned baby girl. In itself, this account would merely duplicate the narratives of other adoptive families. However, Jennifer Phillips’ journey unexpectedly detoured into heartache, causing indefinite separation from her husband and three biological children. Her struggle with bureaucratic injustice will make you want to call a politician—and many did just that. Yet, in the end, it was not political or legal pressure that reunited this family. God’s hand was at work, using every disappointment to teach a young mother about His unrelenting love. Join the thousands who have walked alongside Jennifer and Lucy as they tried to reunite with their family. Jennifer’s humor and vulnerability will captivate your heart and transform her story into your story as your eyes are opened to deep gospel truths that are only unearthed in the soil of suffering.

A wee one is found, softly whimpering, on a small patch of dirt in the heart of southern Vietnam. At the orphanage, they discover her name and birth date scrawled on her arm. Although her physical deformity is glaringly obtrusive, her eyes reveal a wise soul full of desperation and a longing for acceptance.

From the Dust Jacket: Brooks Hansen’s fiction has garnered comparisons to Lewis Carroll, Jorge Luis Borges, and Edgar Allan Poe. The New York Times Book Review once said of Hansen’s work, “literary grace that has the remarkable power to act as a lens.” In his first full-length work of nonfiction, Hansen brings the same tremendous literary gift to bear on an astonishing and candid tale of his journey to fatherhood.

While miracles in reproductive technology have brought joy to millions, those very advances have plunged many couples into an unrelenting cycle of hope and heartbreak. One failed attempt may lead to another and another—but how do you give up when there is always another doctor, another procedure holding out the possibility of conception and the child you yearn for?

Brooks Hansen vividly captures the emotional turmoil he and his wife, Elizabeth, endured as they tried to conceive, the years their lives were put on hold, and the excruciating sense of loss. He writes too of the couple’s journey through the bewildering world of adoption—a path to parenthood fraught with financial, legal, and emotional risks of its own.

Offering men a chance to be heard and women a rare opportunity to view the struggle with infertility from a male perspective, The Brotherhood of Joseph brings to life the anger, frustration, humor, and sense of helplessness that come to dominate the husband’s role.

As his remarkable account reaches its finale in Siberia, Hansen’s tale broadens, becoming once again the story of a husband and a wife who, even after years of medical frustration and fruitless paperwork, still must take one last risk together and trust in their most basic instincts before their new family can be born.

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About the Author: Brooks Hansen has written five novels and his work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Best Life, Open City, Grand Street, and Bookforum. He and Elizabeth live with their children, Theo and Ada, in California.

The daughter of an American international businessman, Elizabeth Evans grew up in three different countries in Asia. Seeing herself as an adopted daughter of Asia, the region became part of her identity and her soul. When she and her husband had three sons, they thought their family was complete, but fate had other plans for them. When they set out to adopt a daughter into their boy-majority family, they looked to the Eurasian country of Kazakhstan. Their adoption trip had too many tense moments, with missed flights, scary Russian officials and spy-novel worthy checkpoints. Elizabeth doesn’t hold back in talking about the difficult aftermath of adoption, something that she feels is important to share to reassure adoptive parents that they are never alone in their journey.

From the Publisher: What happens after a single Baha’i woman adopts three children from the Republic of Buryatia in Siberia? Follow the challenges of the author and her family in this sequel to Siberian Pearls: A Buryat Journey. Starting life in a Siberian orphanage presents difficulties for all the children and for their first-time mom, who hopes that her experience as a psychologist will help her cope with each child’s special needs. With humor, candor, and a drive to find information to help her family, the author describes the demands of rural family life in both America and Siberia, single parenting, remarriage, multiculturalism, special education, and mental health problems in children, including ADHD, Tourette’s syndrome, learning disabilities, and reactive attachment disorder. How does prejudice affect adoptive families? What can Buryat culture teach us? Can all problems be cured with love? Some of the answers might surprise you.

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By the Same Author: Siberian Pearls: A Buryat Journey (2005).

On a March evening in 2000, an unexpected and unsettling thought came out of nowhere, disrupting Debbie Michael’s comfortable life—adoption! It was neither her idea nor her desire to adopt; she was already the mother of three. Instinctively, she knew God was speaking to her, but she did not want to listen if His message required action as life-changing as adopting an orphan. Dread lingered in the aftermath of the disturbing suggestion, and a debilitating fog of uncertainty settled over her life. A journey of a thousand miles (or five thousand, in this case) might begin with a single step, but Debbie was not eager to take that first step. Though God was relentless, she remained adamant. She was determined to ignore the nudging. But God would not be ignored! God pried Debbie out of her comfortable existence and opened a door to a life she didn’t know existed. But the Greatest of These is Love is about much more than adoption. It is a story about the powerful and astonishing ways God uses ordinary people to accomplish His divine intention that we love one another.