The Family Nobody Wanted

by Helen Grigsby Doss

Book Overview

Doss's charming, touching, and at times hilarious chronicle tells how each of the children, representing white, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, Mexican, and Native American backgrounds, came to... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• ISBN: B002C0GS0M
• Release Date: January 1968
• Publisher: Scholastic Book Services
• Weight: 2.15 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Discontinued High School Treasure

In 1991 our local high school was selling off some old books from their library. I picked up a book with a rather sad looking cover. Upon opening it I saw that it was titled, "The Family Nobody Wanted" and it was covered in scribble. The scribble on this 1954 copyright says this, "Wonderful book to read! This well be one of the best books you have ever read! Oh Yea!; Good Book, Read it!; This book is real cool!; This book is great and great for a book report!; Kid! Read this book! It is stunning!; Notice everybody! This is the a real cool book, so people take head and read this book!; This is a great book and you will not regret reading it!" There are about 20 more reviews written throughout the book by high school students. With that in mind I figured I had better buy it for the 25 cents they were asking. I was so delighted to read it but had misplaced it just short of finishing during a move. My husband has read it and cried, laughed, giggled, all while learning what a struggle this family must have gone through to adopt and deal with prejudices. I have recently found it in our move to Germany and I am over joyed to have finished it finally. I hold this book as a treasure in my life representing the true nature of humanity. What a wonderful story! Thanks for trusting your instincts Helen Doss and sharing your personal life with us! What a blessing.

Probably my favorite book of all time...

I first read this book at the age of 10, after ordering it from Scholastic book services. I have since read it uncountable numbers of times, each re-reading bringing warm feelings at the familiar passages. This reprint has been highly anticipated, as I had wondered for years what had happened to the Doss family after the end of the book. It is the story of a man and a woman, and their desire for a family. But it is also much more. It is the tale of the strength found in a loving family, a family made by love and not biology. It is a reminder that we are all family, flesh and blood or not, skin color and ancestry aside. And it is filled with the humor that only small active children can provide! I highly recommend this book for readers of all ages, and would suggest it to families to read aloud together.

Reunited with an old favorite.

When I recieved this book as a gift from my brother(see Ken Pierce's Review) I actually cried from happiness. I had no idea he was the one who had taken the battered copy from our family home, and have searched for the last fifteen years for another one. I had finally given up, and simply told my children, "If you never get to read it, you will have missed one of the greatest books ever written." It's re-release is a blessing that I am glad to share with them.The new addition has a forword by Mary Battenfield which, unfortunately, makes this book sound like a social justice primer. Instead it is a book of love, joy, and laughter in situations that "should" have left the author and her family bitter instead of blessed. When I first read this book I was too young to truly understand racism, and was simply gripped by the way Mrs. Doss made her children come to life in my mind. I could relate to the children, as their personalities, not their race, gave each a unique voice. Now that I am an adult, I understand that the Dosses had a wisdom, love, and faith that transcended their culture. The family and the book prove that one doesn't have to preach to change the world. I can truly say that my life is better from having been introduced to both.

An all-time favorite

Only my closest friends are given the privilege of borrowing this delightfully written true story; the long out-of-print and (before the days of the internet) irreplaceable book has been one of my most closely guarded treasures since childhood. Any family with several small children, of course, will have a store of hilarious anecdotes; children raised with love combine insouciant joy with freedom from adult assumptions and habits of thought, so that any house full of love and children is a house full of unpredictability and laughter. But Helen Doss, unlike most parents, can capture her children in her writing and pass the joy on to us. I don't know anyone who has managed to read the book through without at some point laughing to the point of tears.But the book is much more than a connection of Readers' Digest anecdotes strung together. Ms. Doss reveals, through deft and honest touches, her own weaknesses and struggles, her impetuosity and her grit. She communicates with power the pain that can come in so many different ways to a woman with a tremendous need to love, especially when obstacles - infertility, unreasonable adoption agencies, poverty - rise up to keep her from satisfying that need. And the portrait of her husband Carl, who changes as much as the children do, is vivid and telling. The Carl who says, "Let's take `em all" at the end of the book is a very different Carl from the one who agrees to the first adoption largely to humor his wife and to keep her from moping weepily and endlessly about the house, and whose annual refrain for many years is, "This is the last one!" You expect him to come on board, of course; but his path is a bit surprising and most revealing of the essence of the man. In particular his ability to close ranks against outside inteference shows the degree to which his love for his family is as strong as his wife's, however differently it might be expressed.As a family memoir alone, it would be a classic. But because the children were of mixed racial ancestry - in the `forties and `fifties - the Doss family became an unwilling catalyst for the ignorance and prejudice of the time. It is part of the Doss magic that the love in the family was strong enough to triumph over the unpleasant incidents, so that those incidents enriched, rather than poisoned, the Doss childhoods. (Not that this made them less unpleasant, of course.)The book is never preachy. Nevertheless, it is a vivid documentary of how racism was built into the attitudes of even "nice" people of that time. It is a sermon of a kind, a sermon lived out in the lives of the Doss family. It is a primer on how to overcome evil with good, a standing lesson to a nation still struggling with racial resentment.But the genuinely remarkable thing is that, despite the frequent intrusions suffered by the family from racially prejudiced outsiders, the book is not about race. No doubt this is because the Doss family was never about race. When the book crosses your mind in t

The Best Book I Have Ever Read!

I have read a number of books but none that has touched my heart as this. I bought the book at a garage sale when I was 10 years old, due to fire I lost the book a few years ago, and miss it terribly! If you have never read this book you must! Helen has done such a wonderful job at capturing the essence of her story on paper, few can match. Her story of hard times, love, and endurance is so powerful, I cried. I cry now at the thought of not being able to share such a wonderful story with my daughter. If you have a copy of this book, be sure to treasure it always.