In the past, adoption has been misrepresented to the public and especially to adoptive parents, who have been told that raising an adopted child would be just like raising their own. Lifton, also the author of Twice Born, Lost and Found, and Tell Me a Real Adoption Story, sensitively explores the adoptee`s quest for wholeness in this book, relying her own experience as both an adoptee and a counselor specializing in adoption. She argues that here are special issues that adoptees grapple with that their parents and other loved ones must be aware of. This book does not attack adoptive or birth parents, but rather, explores the reality of life for adopted persons, free of the fantasy and denial many of them were raised with. She proposes that adoptees have at least two sets of parents and that reconciling this complex heritage is a a difficult process.