Reviewed by Susan Phillips

Since becoming a parent 14 years ago, I've come to feel that the process of family creation combines the randomness of a Lotto drawing with the painstaking construction and maintenance of a whole small world of rituals, values, quirks and mythologies. And I've wondered whether the effort to engineer a family environment with a breathable atmosphere is any harder—or easier—for adoptive families.

A Love Like No Other, an excellent collection of 20 diverse tales from adoptive parents of very different stripes, doesn't so much answer that question as render it moot. The writers, who include editors Kruger and Smolowe along with 18 others, take the reader directly inside their varied families, some strong and some fragile, in a way that makes them seem at least as real as the family next door. The fact of adoption remains central, but the individual parents and children become so vivid that it is more of a background or frame for their stories than an issue or theme for the book. The theme, instead, seems to be the idea of family creation itself.

Anyone from any family can recognize the families here—some with their boats rocked by divorce, learning problems, mental or physical illness, loss or rage— others floating in calmer waters. Perhaps the most consistent difference between these families and non-adoptive families is that the elements of choice and chance loom a little larger.

A Love Like No Other is divided into four sections. The first is called "Reflections on Birth Parents," and includes Christina Frank's reflections on the unknown young Vietnamese woman whose daughter, Lucy, Frank has adopted; Pamela Kruger's tale of hiring an investigator to contact the young Kazakh woman who had given up her daughter for eventual adoption by the Krugers. Another chapter describes the relationship between an adoptive gay male couple and the mother of their son, who explore the less-known territory of an open adoption.

"Encounters with the Unexpected" opens with a powerful account of post-adoption depression, or, as author Melissa Fay Greene terms it, panic. Greene's honest description of her conflicted and often hostile feelings towards her adopted son is a bracing corrective to the happy tales of love conquering all that make up much adoption writing, and confronts a phenomenon that is more common than many of us realize. Another chapter looks at the reluctance of extended family members to truly embrace an adopted child into the clan. Jill Smolowe's contribution examines the experience of expanding a family to include children of a different race or ethnicity.

"Variations on Family" and "Personal Transformations" complete the volume.

This is a well-written and compelling book that has a lot to offer both those contemplating adoption and those who simply want to understand it better. Since 60 percent of Americans now report a personal connection to families of adoption, that's a pretty big potential audience. No book can do it all, but it would be nice if the editors could follow up with tales that cast a somewhat wider demographic net—moving out of the middle class, for instance, or perhaps including the stories of adoptive children themselves.

Read the online chat with editors and writers from this book.