Review: "Children Like Us" by Brittany Penner

Children Like Us by Brittany Penner
Published November 2025 via Regalo Press
★★★★

Such a lucky child, so many remind me. To be unwanted and then adopted, how lucky. To be raised by someone who doesn't have to love you but chooses to love you—how special. Any time someone says this to me, the image of my birth mother flashes in my mind. Faceless and alone, in an empty room.

"Adopted children are always Native," a lady at church with no children will one day say to me, "and we never knew any well-behaved ones. But if we knew they could be like you, we would've adopted." (loc. 964*)

Penner was raised by Mennonites in small-town Canada, raised by parents who loved her but didn't always know how to respond to her, and who didn't necessarily want her to dig into her roots. Adopting a child was one thing; talking opening about that adoption with the child was another. And so Penner's book is decades-long attempt to reconcile the multiple parts of her identity and various people she knew as family—family by birth, family by circumstance, family by choice.

Some of the most interesting—and difficult—material comes early on, as Penner wrestles with her broader family structure. Her parents were not the only ones in the family who had adopted, and in their heavily White, Mennonite community, only the adopted children were First Nations. (This was at the tail end of a time when First Native children were forcibly taken from their parents as a matter of policy, and also part of an ongoing treatment of First Nations people as less competent parents...leading to, at the time, a surplus of First Nations children in the system, fostered or adopted by White families. There's since been a shift to more of an effort to keep children within their communities/roots, but that hasn't erased institutional racism.) Penner was adopted, but her siblings were foster children, and if it's possible to explain to a young child that your siblings won't be there permanently, well, that wasn't communicated well to Penner. I imagine many if not most adopted children grow up with a lot of questions, but thinking as a young child that you will be taken away from the only family you know (not an experience unique to adopted children, I know) seems particularly rough.

This one came up in a search for me when I was visiting family in Canada (my mother's library has a huge collection of books by indigenous writers, and any given book has a reasonable chance of sending me down a rabbit hole), so I was pretty happy to get my hands on it. It lived up to expectations...now perhaps time to have a look for another of the books that turned up on that search.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.