Adoption now touches the lives of more American families than ever before. With 1.6 million adopted children living in the United States today, 60 percent of Americans report a personal connection to such families. But most books about adoption tend to focus narrowly on the process of adopting a child, and books on child development and parenting either completely ignore adoption or treat it as a strange condition. Frustrated by this lack, Pamela Kruger asked friend and fellow journalist, Jill Smolowe, to collaborate on a collection of essays that would openly explore the special challenges, issues, and pleasures that adoptive parents encounter in raising their kids.

The result was A Love Like No Other: Stories from Adoptive Parents, published by Riverhead Books in November 2005. (It was released in paperback in October 2006.) Edited by Pamela Kruger and Jill Smolowe, the book features essays by twenty novelists and journalists, including Kruger and Smolowe, as well as winners of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and Emmy Award. The anthology includes parents who are single, gay, and married, as well as those whose families blend races, cultures, and biological and adopted kids. By turns humorous, sobering, provocative, joyous—and all refreshingly honest—A Love Like No Other introduces the reader to a complex emotional, candid, and wholly recognizable look at the new American family.