A Métis girl is adopted by a Mennonite family in this breathtaking memoir about family lost and found—for those who loved From the Ashes, Educated and Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related.

"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."

By the time Brittany Penner is seven years old, she has loved and lost twenty-one foster siblings who have come into her family and left—all of them Indigenous like her. "When will it be my turn?" she asks her mother time and time again. "When will I be taken away?" You won't be, she is told. You're adopted. You're here to stay. You're the lucky one.

Brittany was relinquished into care on the day of her birth in 1989 and adopted by a white Mennonite family in a small prairie town. Her name and where she came from are hidden from her; all she is told is that she is part-Métis. Her childhood is shaped by church, family, service and silence. Her family is continuously shapeshifting as siblings enter and leave, one by one. She knows, to stay, she has to force herself into the mold created for her. She must be obedient. Quiet. Good. No matter what.

Whenever she looks in the mirror, she searches her features, wondering if they've been passed down to her by her biological mother. She thinks, if she can ever find her mother, she'll find all the answers she's looking for. As Brittany moves into adolescence and then adulthood, she will uncover answers about her roots and her identity—but they will be more tangled than she could have imagined.

Children Like Us asks difficult questions about family, identity, belonging and cultural continuity. What happens when you find what you are looking for, but it can't offer you everything you need? How do you reckon with the truth of your own story when you've always been told you're one of the "lucky ones"? What does it mean to belong when you feel torn between cultures? And how does a person learn to hold the pain and the grief, as well as the triumphs, the joys and the beauty, allowing none to eclipse the other?

Brittany Penner's profile page

BRITTANY PENNER is an author, practicing family physician and lecturer with the University of Manitoba Max Rady College of Medicine, and has been a keynote speaker at the University of Manitoba. She is currently an MFA candidate at Harvard University. Her personal essays have appeared in Salon, The Globe and Mail, Maclean's, Huffington Post Canada, This Magazine and Canadian Family Physician, and typically revolve around the complex nature of identity and family dynamics.

"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, author of Wild Game
“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