Anything But Easy: A Memoir of a Special-Needs Adoption from China

Tender, heartfelt, and brutally honest, Anything but Easy by Marie Spiess is an insightful memoir of her family's experience adopting a toddler with special needs from China. In eight moving chapters with titles like "The Paperwork Chase" and "The Waiting Game," Spiess recounts how fate played a role and how it came to be that Zhuge Juanzi, a little girl born with a cleft lip and palate half way around the world, made an otherwise perfect family extraordinary. Readers learn that it was a tough journey of unconditional love for a child the family had never met; it was anything but easy, and, yet, it was worth each setback and every delay. With clear advice, the author describes what to expect when couples first meet the adopted child, what the first few months look like, as well as what siblings might anticipate. For families considering the adoption of a child with special needs, here's an insider's account-and a loving reflection of what it took to fulfill one mother's dream.