Children Like Us
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.
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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.
On the day of her birth in 1989, near the end of the Sixties Scoop, Brittany was relinquished into the care of the government 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 Métis. Her childhood is shaped by church, family, service and silence. Her family is continuously shifting as siblings arrive and depart, one by one. She knows that 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 find her mother, she'll find all the answers she's looking for. As Brittany moves into adulthood, she will uncover answers—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're 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 lucky and should be grateful? 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 others?
Brittany Penner is fierce and fearless, and her story is a gripping and powerful one. Hers is a voice we need to hear, a moral compass in our increasingly disoriented times.
Susan Choi, award-winning author of Trust Exercise
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
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
Children Like Us offers unforgettably intimate insight into the life of a person fractured from history, family and culture, and who for a long time held the impossible weight of her questions alone and within one small body. In arresting prose, Brittany Penner writes about love, loss and hope despite the most heartbreaking of circumstances. Here is a story about adoption, race and pain that is not about finding a perfect solution, but that provokes still-necessary questions about colonialism and kinship like nothing I’ve seen before.
Jenny Heijun Wills, award-winning author of Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related. and Everything and Nothing At All
Brittany Penner’s writing is as tender as it is raw, her voice as searing as it is poetic. Children Like Us is not the kind of story you simply read—it commands that you feel. This memoir is a resplendent meditation on belonging, love, loss and the persistent journey toward healing.
Perdita Felicien, nationally bestselling author of My Mother’s Daughter