Labours of Love: Canadians Talk About Adoption by Deborah A. Brennan - A Book Review

Wow! I can't imagine what it took to compile this book both emotionally and physically. It includes perspectives from all sides of the adoption world. Adoptees, adoptive parents, step-adoptees, birthparents, social workers, private and public adoption... If adoption has touched your heart, this book will do the same.

Brennan pored her heart into this and it is clearly evident in the final product. The family stories could each stand beautifully on their own. She has a natural story-teller style and yet, journalistically stays true to the people who she's interviewed. 20 adoption stories and each one beautifully and simply told.

Each story brought me to tears, smiles and laughter and eager to read the next. Serving each story separately offers you the ability to pick the book up and put it down when you have a moment to spare in your hectic life. Additionally, each story has amazing pictures that really show the love of the diverse families she has chosen to feature.

The book completes with 7 professional perspectives on adoption, its history, and its future specifically in Canada, but relevant to all. These are again diverse in their opinions and focus. I finished this book feeling I had an amazing picture of adoption as a whole. Each story featured was unique, but with uniting themes of love and openness being key to the understanding of adoption. Should you pick it up for yourself, Dr. Michael Grand, one of the last professional accounts featured, has an amazing and unique understanding of adoption that resonates perfectly with my own experience.

As a 'step-adoptee' myself and now starting on the course of becoming an adoptive parent, it valued my own many emotions and personal connections with adoption. It certainly resonated with my own motherhood experience and the seemingly obvious concept that family is love and children from any background can't have too much of it.

As adoption in Canada and throughout the world continues to change, I hope Brennan will keep her finger on the pulse of those changes and continue to compile adoptions stories and compile yet another book of people's journeys toward family, openness, and love.