“Completely riveting, wonderfully written, engaging on every level. I have lingered over it, absorbing and marvelling at the writers’ use of language, her honesty, her exquisitely captured sorrow and pain. ”

“Barbara’s understanding, perspective and focus on the real effects and challenges of adoption - which comes alive in her eloquent writing style - has a way of getting under your skin, but in the positive sense.
Her deeper seeing eye liberates us all from these outdated entanglements of colonial adoption ideas and strategies. With deep and fresh insight, she goes beyond adoption and invites us all to reconsider and reinterpret what it means to be truly human, to be safe - and to genuinely belong in the uncertain world of today.”

“From the opening lines, Barbara Sumner’s Tree of Strangers gripped me on the level of its brilliantly evoked personal story.

This is an author whose intensely visual grasp can do what other books only promise, it actually does transport the reader into scenes and situations so vividly described that they feel like one’s own lived experience.

Here is a privileged journey into a life and a life-long quest born of pain, and full of drama and mystery. That mystery keeps the reader (arguably traps them into) compulsively turning the pages, Barbara’s need to know more about herself, her beginnings, her family becomes our own compulsion.

Tree of Strangers has a lot more on its mind than just Barbara’s own personal story, it takes aim at the whole edifice of stranger adoption and in doing so gives the long-buried other side of a story almost as old as our society, overturning assumptions and pressing on bruises most of us have never stopped to imagine might exist.

Reading Tree of Strangers is to be assailed by revelations legal, moral, narrative and emotional. To say it stays with you is an understatement.”

“ I was so taken by how dexterous Barbara Sumner was in weaving her own sometimes painful and harrowing tale with current adoption policies, making a succinct and brilliant case for radical reform. Riveting, informative and insightful.”

“I opened Tree of Strangers with high expectations of a well-told story that would entertain me.

Once I started however, I could not stop reading. I finished the book in the early hours and thinking about what I read kept me awake for most of the night. I think about it still.

Barbara Sumner’s Tree of Strangers doesn’t simply tell a remarkable story, it shines a harsh light on the way that our society has completely failed to accord the most basic of human rights to adopted children in New Zealand, the right to know who you are and where you are from.

This is an important story, and one that I hope will act as a catalyst to change our laws, to give adopted people their long-overdue rights.”