Fascinating stories of adoption reunions from an expert investigator. Pamela Slaton has an enviable record of being able to find both birth families and children placed for adoption. Genealogists may be disappointed at the lack of detail on how she accomplishes her searches but her aim in this book is to explore how families are able, or not, to reunite after many years. It is not a "how-to" book.

As an adoptee, I was really interested in reading this book! Slaton, an adoptee herself and a paid searcher, is well prepared to tell these stories. And indeed, the stories about reconnecting birth parents and their lost children under what seem like impossible circumstances are very touching and I'm impressed with her detective skills! The stories seem real, the emotions honest. She also makes discoveries about children relinquished for adoption within her own family, making her even more driven to reunited lost family members.

That said, it is probably outside of the scope of her book to address the political and legal barriers that force adoptees and birth parents turn to paid searchers. Decades of sealed adoption records make searching so incredibly difficult that adoptees have little choice but to turn to experts like Slaton and pay large sums of money for information that should rightfully be theirs in the first place.opening adoption records and promoting transparency in adoption rather than secrecy and legal lies would empower adoptees and allow them to conduct their own, very meaningful searches. ( )