The Jolie-Pitts do it; Madonna does it, but that’s not the bloody point of National Adoption Month 2006 (November). This year’s theme—”Answering the Call: You don’t have to be perfect to be a perfect parent. There are thousands of teens in foster care who would love to put up with you”—seems to send a pro-”common people” message. So what if you’re not loaded and traffic-stopping gorgeous? You’ve still got the goods to turn a child’s life around. And in editing “Adoption Options 2006,” a web roundup of recent titles on the increasingly popular process by Lynne C. Maxwell, you’re certainly not facing a dearth of materials on adopting and raising a child—three titles are, in fact, starred.

This year, I was struck by the intellectual depth and edginess of the selections. There is a standard, and stellar, how-to guide featured (Dawn Davenport’s The Complete Book of International Adoption, Broadway), but there are also some gritty, not-all-sunshine-and-roses takes, especially David Kirschner’s Adoption: Unchartered Waters: A Psychologist’s Case Studies (Juneau Press), about the connection between adoption and a sociopathy-like condition, and Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption (South End Press), which questions the “win-win” popular slant on celebrity adoption (hurrah!).

Looking for more still? Check out LJ’s reviews of these older, starred adoption titles: Randall Kennedy’s Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption, Emily Prager’s Wuhu Diary: On Taking My Adopted Daughter Back to Her Hometown in China, and Neely Tucker’s Love in the Driest Season: A Family Memoir, whose focus on a couple’s struggle to adopt a baby from Zimbabwe echoes the Madonna debacle.