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DGC Book Club – Unnatural Selection: A Memoir of Adoption and Wilderness by Andrea Ross. Nonfiction 2021

April 2, 2026 12:30 pm

Andrea Ross is a local Davis author

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Brown bag lunch 12:30 – Book discussion begins 1:00 in the Genealogy library.
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Adopted at birth, Andrea Ross grew up inhabiting two ecosystems: one was her tangible, adoptive family, the other her birth family, whose mysterious landscape was hidden from her. In this coming-of-age memoir, Ross narrates how in her early twenties, while working as a ranger in Grand Canyon National Park, she embarked on a journey to discover where she came from and, ultimately, who she was. After many missteps and dead ends, Ross uncovered her heartbreaking and inspiring origin story and began navigating the complicated turns of reuniting with her birth parents and their new families. Through backcountry travel in the American West, she also came to understand her place in the world, realizing that her true identity lay not in a choice between adopted or biological parents, but in an expansion of the concept of family.

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To find a copy of the book, we recommend a public library, audible.com, Amazon, local bookstores, eBay, AddAll.com, betterworldbooks.comthriftbooks.com and other locations for used books