A shelf for an adopted child, and for the family who went and got them. You pick the one that fits your child's age and the question they're actually asking this week. There's a fairy tale, a true story about penguins, a bird looking for a mother who looks like him, and two books about a family flying a very long way. Start with Tell Me Again About the Night I Was Born if you're not sure where to begin, because it's the one where the child tells the grown-ups how the story goes.
You choose by age and by what your child is asking. The thing worth knowing before you pick is whose story each one tells, because adoption books split along that line and the split is invisible from the cover. Over the Moon and I Wished for You belong to the parents: they open on a mother's dream and a mother's wish, and the child is what's found at the end. That's real and it's loving, and for a child who wants to know they were wanted it works beautifully. Tell Me Again is the other kind, the child demands her own story and makes the grown-ups perform it, and for a lot of adopted children that's the better act. The Red Thread is a fairy tale rather than an explanation. A Mother for Choco is an animal story that never says the word adoption at all, which makes it the easiest way in for the youngest child and the wrong one for an older child who wants the truth. And Tango Makes Three is about penguins and belongs here from an angle. Read each book's own note, because on this shelf the differences between them are the whole point.