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 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.

“My children are the third generation in our family to be adopted … and to grow up without their father. These repetitions fascinate me.”

Blood Strangers

”…reads like a novel and spins from the heart, examining three generations of children fatherless by choice or chance with a mother’s loving eye and a writer’s chiseled prose.”

~ Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean

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“Blood Strangers, Kathy Briccetti’s long personal journey to reclaim her family’s past, illuminates how the secrets of closed adoption can linger, haunting subsequent generations. Only when she succeeds at piecing the puzzle of her family back together does she seem to find complete peace with herself, proof perhaps that hindsight about one’s origins is not only enlightening but necessary.”

~ Jean A. S. Strauss, author of Birthright: The Guide to Search and Reunion for Adoptees, Birthparents, and Adoptive Parents

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“Abortion and adoption, stepfathers and sperm donors, birth mothers, marriage and divorce—it’s all here in Blood Strangers, a fine and fascinating memoir about the complicated love between parents and children in a modern American family.”

~ Beth J. Harpaz, author of Finding Annie Farrell and The Girls in the Van

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“Told with clearheaded eloquence, Kathy Briccetti’s story easily transcends its particulars, compelling in their own right—fatherlessness, adoption, same-sex parenting—to explore such universal issues as belonging and identity. Readers of various experiences will get swept up in her dogged quest for connection.”

~ Sarah Saffian, author of Ithaka: A Daughter’s Memoir of Being Found

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“Blood Strangers is a story of hard-earned wisdom, forgiveness, and the unending search for self. In our culture of absent fathers, it fills in a vivid spot in the mosaic.”

~ Mark Matousek, author of The Boy He Left Behind: A Man’s Search for His Lost Father 

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”Blood Strangers is a book about the different ways families come together, fall apart, and come together again, healed by the power of love. Katherine A. Briccetti has written a moving memoir with a sure hand and a strong heart.”

~ Leslea Newman, author of Heather Has Two Mommies

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”…an interesting delving into nature and nurture, and how they intertwine and intersect in one woman’s life.”

~ Dr. Joyce Maguire Pavao, author of The Family of Adoption

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“Kathy Briccetti has written a moving, lyrical, and deeply satisfying book about the search for her extended family. Part memoir, part genealogical detective story, part reflection on the changing American family, Blood Strangers is a wonderful reminder of how the ties that bind us can transcend time and distance.”

~ Frances Dinkelspiel, author of Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California

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