"Children Like Us is a luminous memoir about identity, loss and belonging. Adopted at birth by a white Mennonite family, Brittany Penner grows up straddling two worlds—one she knows and one that remains just out of reach. As she pieces together her origins, she reckons with the complexities of family, love and cultural displacement. Both intimate and unflinching, Children Like Us is a powerful exploration of what it means to know where you come from—and what it costs when that knowledge is withheld." —Adrienne Brodeur, nationally bestselling author of Wild Game

"With themes of colonialism, intergenerational trauma and healing, Penner's memoir is candid and caring, heartwrenching and hopeful." —Ms. Magazine

"An absolutely mesmerizing debut. It was a privilege to bear witness to Brittany Penner's story about intergenerational trauma, identity, and belonging. The kinds of complicated grief we so often experience in life are born out of the complexity of human relationships and our fierce ability to both hurt and heal one another. Penner explores this truth deftly, with wisdom, compassion and grace. I hope everyone reads this book." —Claire Bidwell Smith, author of The Rules of Inheritance

"Brittany Penner is fierce and fearless, and her story is a gripping and powerful one. Hers is a voice we need to hear—a moral compass in our increasingly disoriented times." —Susan Choi, award-winning author of Trust Exercise

"Brittany Penner's writing is as tender as it is raw, her voice as searing as it is poetic. Children Like Us is not the kind of story you simply read—it commands that you feel. This memoir is a resplendent meditation on belonging, love, loss and the persistent journey toward healing." —Perdita Felicien, nationally bestselling author of My Mother's Daughter

"Children Like Us offers unforgettably intimate insight into the life of a person fractured from history, family and culture, and who for a long time held the impossible weight of her questions alone and within one small body. In arresting prose, Brittany Penner writes about love, loss and hope despite the most heartbreaking of circumstances. Here is a story about adoption, race and pain that is not about finding a perfect solution, but that provokes still-necessary questions about colonialism and kinship like nothing I’ve seen before." —Jenny Heijun Wills, award-winning author of Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related. and Everything and Nothing At All