Reviews

“[N]othing short of stunning. This book will stay with you long after you close the cover.”  —Lori Holden, author, The Open-Hearted Way to Open Adoption

“Many adoption memoirs detail the journey that brings parent and child together . . . and end with a loving, triumphant homecoming. Fewer follow the story years down the road, as parents and child knit themselves into a family. Traster holds nothing back in recounting that second journey, to truly become her child’s mother.”  —Eve Gilman, editor, Adoptive Families Magazine

"If you are an adoptive parent, don’t miss this book.”  —Jane Ballback, publisher and executive editor, Adoption Voices Magazine

“Tina Traster takes us on her roller-coaster ride of becoming an adoptive mother . . . . Many will read this mother’s journey of breaking through her daughter’s protective shell with strong, deliberate parenting, and they’ll know that they are not alone."  —Julie Beem, executive director, Attachment & Trauma Network, Inc.

"Like Jessie Hogsett's helpful Detached, this title is indispensable for adoptive parents, relatives, and teachers." —Library Journal

“Traster’s memoir is simultaneously unnerving and inspirational. The adoption world—and everyone surrounding it (meaning everyone)—needs to better understand the realities that affect so many children being adopted from orphanages today. The timing of this starkly honest book could not be better.” —Adam Pertman, president, The Donaldson Adoption Institute, and author of Adoption Nation: How the Adoption Revolution Is Transforming Our Families—and America

“A riveting story that takes you on an extraordinary journey with the author, her husband, and Julia, the emotionally constricted daughter they adopted from a Russian orphanage. Their struggle with love and loss, frustration and disappointment, fear and hope will chill and ultimately thrill anyone who is a parent—through birth or adoption—or who is thinking about becoming one.” —Gloria Hochman, director of communications, National Adoption Center

“Traster’s experiences and the way she writes about the realities of adoption are very helpful to everyone raising a child with RAD or thinking of adopting a child who may have RAD.” —Irene Clements, president, National Foster Parent Association