Blood Strangers by Katherine A. Briccetti

A powerful and nuanced tale about the search for family

Blood Strangers is a captivating, multigenerational story of an alternative family. In her memoir, Katherine A. Briccetti writes about three generations of missing fathers: her father's closed adoption in the 1930s, her own adoption by her stepfather in the 1960s, and finally, the second-parent adoption of her sons by her partner in the 1990s.

Fascinated from an early age by the holes in her family tree, Briccetti takes it upon herself to search for her father's birth parents. As her search begins to reveal more tantalizing clues about the family she never knew, she is forced to confront her own tenuous relationship with her two fathers--the father who gave her up as a little girl and the stepfather she struggles to connect with in her adult years. But when she forms her own family with Pam, her longtime partner, Briccetti learns that families can be made under many different circumstances.