Happily Adopted / Literature

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• In the 1632 series, Tom "Stoner" Stone's three "sons" all act like and treat each other as brothers, even though only one of them, Faramir ("Frank"), is definitely his. Elrond ("Ron") might be Tom's boy by another mother (commune, hippies), but Gwaihir ("Gerry") is clearly unrelated to the others. They have no issues with that, nor with their 17th century German stepmom, but some of the townsfolk do.
• In The Abused Werewolf Rescue Group, Toby is a bit of a Momma's Boy, and the fact that he was adopted is only mentioned briefly. In this setting werewolves are Magical Seventh Sons from certain families; Toby was raised as an only child, but is vaguely aware that his birth mother had other children.
• Achim in The Adoptive Room by Antonia Michaelis. Played halfway with Karl Sonntag from another book ( he finds his father, and is quite happy with his stepmother.
• The titular character of Alfie the Werewolf starts out as a foster child, but is officially adopted by his foster family at the end of the third book.
• The All American Pups book New Pup on the block features two examples of the animal variation:
  • Jake begins the first book in a shelter but is soon rescued by Mr. Casey.
  • Rosie, who is thrown out of a car in the first book, is adopted by John, the local deli owner, at the end.
• In the American Girl Samantha stories, Samantha's friend Nellie and her sisters get sent to an Orphanage of Fear. Of course, she breaks out and is happily adopted by Sam's extraordinarily wealthy family.
• Anne of Green Gables and Pollyanna may not have been 100% satisfied with their situations, but they were definitely loved.
  • Anne of Green Gables also subverts this, as Anne tells how she was put into the care of several foster families before the events of the books and how each of these families treated her horribly. Nonetheless, Anne still remembers them as kindly as she can (and is sympathetic to these families since they all were dirt poor). It's because of this and the real possibility that Anne may be adopted by another horrible family that Marilla Cuthbert decides to keep her. Marilla, her brother Matthew, and Anne become a very close and loving family and Anne loves them deeply as her parents.
  • In Anne of Avonlea, Marilla and Anne adopt Dora and Davy Keith (six-year-old twins) after their mother dies. Their father died when they were babies and their mother was sick for several years before she died, so the twins have been neglected for most of their young lives. Marilla is often exasperated by Davy's mischievous tendencies and Davy often complains about Marilla's strict household rules, but the twins are well cared for and loved; overall, Green Gables is a happy home for them.
• Archer's Goon, in which Howard finds out he is adopted; he's taken aback at first but brings it up with his parents soon afterward and realises how much they love him. In addition, it turns out that the adoption has actually happened twice, due to various time-travel-related shenanigans, and the second time around, the influence of the adoptive parents has affected Howard, now on his third trip through puberty, positively enough that he is able to break the cycle he started when he was Venturus.
• In Ariel (Block), Ariel is happy with David, but is increasingly put off by and fearful of Roberta. She senses that Roberta does not merely dislike her or conflict with her due to her age, but genuinely wants to be rid of her, and would have been happy if she had died instead of Caleb. She's right.
• Jaenelle of the Black Jewels series tells her biological grandmother, "This body can trace its bloodline to you. That makes us related. It doesn't make us family."
• Fearless from Bravelands is kicked out of his pride when his father is murdered. He ends up adopted by a baboon troop, who consider him to be a blessing from their God. Fearless spends the next year living happily amongst the Brightforest Troop, but he is forced out when the new leader decides he's getting too large and is a danger to the troop. Even then, Fearless remains close to his best friends Mud and Thorn.
• At the end of A Brother's Price, little Neddie, born as Eldie Porter, innocent incestuous fruit of traitors, gets adopted by the Whistlers, and since she was very lonely as the only child anywhere near her age in her original family, she's happy to be part of a large family.
• This becomes the default family in the future of Bumped. In this future, all people over the age of 18 are infertile, so families pay teenage couples top dollar to have children for them.
• Taran, the hero of The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander, is well aware that neither the enchanter Dallben nor the pig-keeper Coll are his real father, and that they raised him from a foundling baby. He loves them both dearly, but it doesn't stop him from trying to find out who his birth parents were. Princess Eilonwy, who comes to live in Caer Dallben at the end of the first book in the series, is essentially Happily Adopted by Dallben as well; unlike Taran, she knows at least who her mother was, but the woman has been dead since Eilonwy was a baby.
• Circleverse: Tris, Daja, Sandry and Briar all become adopted siblings, with Lark and Rosethorn as their foster-mothers. Later, Briar himself adopts another street kid, Evvy.
• Simon and Derek from Darkest Powers are foster siblings but Chloe notes that they're closer than any pair of biological brothers she has seen.
• In Deep Secret, both Nick and Maree end up as this, once they discover they are adopted. In Nick's case, the adoptive (step) parent is far preferable to the biological one. In Maree's case, said adoptive parent even gets a Selfless Wish thrown at them.
• The Dinner: Beau is Serge and Babette's adopted son from Burkina Faso, who was raised like one of their own. Considering Beau's attempts to blackmail his adoptive brother and cousin, Paul questions whether Beau was ever truly happy being part of the family.
• Discworld: Carrot Ironfoundersson is a human who was raised by dwarf parents. He is a dwarf, in spite of being born a human and standing over six feet tall, and he always writes home to his parents to tell them about his day and ask how the latest mine shaft is going. Even dwarfs, who have never heard of his clan, recognise him as a dwarf, since being a dwarf is more of a matter of culture rather than of species. It's also implied that his birth family sprang from the dethroned kings of Ankh-Morpork. Implied much in the same way that it's implied that the sun is warmish.
• Played with in the Doctor Who Eighth Doctor Adventures novel Father Time. The Doctor adopts an eleven-year-old girl, who, oddly, looks a lot like him and has the same Bizarre Alien Biology. As he's a Ditzy Genius who acts like he has No Social Skills, it's not exactly a walk in the park, but they're happy enough. He even gets a job, using his superior Time Lord intellect to become quite well-off. However, he makes things highly awkward when she's around the boy she fancies and has no idea what's going on in her love life. And he lies to her about the fact she's not human, causing her to run away from home at the age of sixteen and spend three years traveling around on her own. When he finds her again, they get along just fine, though. But anyway it turns out she's the heir to an intergalactic empire and although she's not on board with the "empire" thing, she has responsibilities she has to leave in order to attend to. They have a heartwarming reunion in a later book, though. It's eventually implied she's his Kid from the Future, so the trope is Double Subverted on the "happy" and subverted on the "adopted", too.
• Szelma of the Dora Wilk Series is a were-cat adopted by a pack of werewolves, but considers herself part of the family, her adopted father is warm and caring and her "brothers" are ready to turn anyone who as much as glanced at her unfavourably into mincemeat.
• Dragonvarld: Ermintrude treated Marcus, Edward's son by Melisande, just the same as their own biological children, loving him deeply. She's just as distraught as Edward when Marcus appears to go mad as a six year old.
• Dreamblood Duology:
  • Sunandi was adopted by Kinja Seh Kalabsha when she was a child and trained to be a diplomat and spy. While her upbringing was trying, Sunandi is aware of the privilege of having had it and her love and devotion for master Kinja is what motivates her to see their mission in Gujaareh through even after his untimely death.
  • Most of those living within the Hetawa, the temple, were adopted by the priesthood, either because their parents died or because they showed talent for narcomancy. Children who grow up within the Hetawa are cared for and educated and generally happy with their lot.
• In Dreamsnake, healers are sterile or effectively so; therefore, they're all adoptees. Snake, the protagonist, adopts the horrifically abused twelve-year-old stablehand Melissa about halfway through the book.
• After the death of her widowed father, Rose Campbell is happily adopted by her bachelor uncle Alec, in Louisa May Alcott's Eight Cousins. In the sequel Rose in Bloom, adult Rose opens an Orphanage of Love, and personally adopts a Heartwarming Orphan whom she names Dulcinea (Dulce for short), who is thus also happily adopted.
• It's mentioned only briefly, but in The Elenium trilogy by David Eddings, the sidekick character Kalten was raised by the hero Sparhawk's family after his own parents were killed when he was a boy. The result was that "in some ways, they were closer than brothers."
• In the first novel of the Emberverse, Dies the Fire, Chuck and Judy Barstow are traveling to Juniper Mackenzie's farm when they discover an abandoned, broken-down bus full of schoolchildren. Not only do they decide to bring the children along with them, but they also later adopt three of them, to whom they are loving and nurturing parents. Juniper sees that the children clearly adore Chuck and Judy, and suspects that "those three didn't really have parents before, only people who paid the bills."
• Candy in Emergence. She speaks very lovingly of her adoptive parents.
• Enchanted Forest Chronicles: Herman the dwarf in Searching for Dragons wound up raising many, many human children whose mothers left them with him. Though he's burdened with the task, he is a loving adoptive father to them even so.
• Erec Rex is a children's book series in which the title character is of the "treats both sets of parents as real" variation. He is introduced as a child living with his adopted mother and several adopted siblings; he loves all of them and thinks of them as his real family. He later meets his real father who turns out to be a king and grows to love him too ( he also learns he has a biological brother and sister who are missing.) He loves both sets of families and cares deeply about them.
• In Fairest, the protagonist was raised by an inkeeper and his wife after her (presumably) biological mother abandoned her in their inn. She states that "they treated me no differently than their own children", and in a later scene, when another character learns Aza is adopted and says he hadn't realized her parents weren't Aza's real parents, and she replies that they are her real parents, just not her biological parents.
• Nina Bawden's novel The Finding focuses on Alex, an eleven year old adopted after being found on a sphinx statue in the middle of London. He's happy enough to be part of the family to the point he doesn't even consider who his biological mother might be until it's suggested he might be elderly widow Mrs Angel's grandson. The novel never reveals whether this is true (and Mrs Angel's nephew makes a very good case why he might not be) because who Alex's biological mother really is doesn't matter- he's already got a loving family who care and look after him.
• In Frostflower and Thorn, the titular warrior Thorn's biological son is wanted and loved by his adoptive mother Frostflower.
• Several examples in The Girl Who Drank the Moon:
  • Xan has a habit of rescuing the Protectorate's babies who are abandoned in the forest to carry them to the Free Cities, where they are given to new families and called Star Children.
  • The titular girl Luna is adopted by Xan and her friends Fyrian the dragon and Glerk the swamp monster, who live as a family and work to raise her.
  • Xan was herself rescued after her family died and raised by a circle of wizards, primarily Zosimos.
• In The Goblin Emperor, after Maia's sister-in-law whom he never really knew betrays him, her children are not officially adopted by anyone, as they remain in the same family, but Maia asks that his nephew and nieces move into his rooms in the palace, and the children happily accept him as their new guardian. As they were mainly brought up by their nanny, whom they get to keep, it is not that big a change.
• The Golden Demon: Kan'ichi Hazama's adoption by the Shigisawa family facilitates the novel's plot; it's how he meets Miya, whom he falls in love with and is engaged to. When the family engages Miya to someone else without telling him, he angrily abandons the family to become a criminal.
• Goodnight Mister Tom: William Beech ends up as this. He's evacuated and put into the care of the initially crusty Thomas Oakley, but Tom proves to be a far kinder and more loving parent than his biological mother. When they hear the news that Mrs Beech has killed herself, Tom argues for William to stay with him, arguing that what he needs is love and the two have come to love each other like father and son. To top it all off, William calls Tom 'Dad' by the end of the novel.
• Nobody Owens from The Graveyard Book is adopted by a graveyard full of ghosts and one vampire after his biological parents and sister are brutally murdered. Naturally, he longs to see the world outside the gates, but he also loves Mr. and Mrs. Owens (the ghosts who raised him) like parents, and they love him like a son.
• This is basically the entire point of The Great Gilly Hopkins. Gilly spends most of the story fantasizing about meeting her mother while looking down on her foster family, but in the end she realizes that she loves her foster family, and finds out that her mother doesn't want her and is far from perfect. Although she doesn't stay with them, she appears to stay in contact with them and ends up more or less this trope with her biological grandmother instead.
• Harry Potter :
  • Harry Potter is never officially adopted by the Weasleys, they still consider him a part of the family and he loves them far more than his horrible aunt, uncle, and cousin. The Weasleys end up as Harry's in-laws once he marries Ginny Weasley, so it all works.
  • Sirius Black reveals that after he was banished from his home and disowned, he went to his best friend, James Potter's parents, who allowed him to live with them until he came of age.
    Sirius: I was always welcome at the Potters.
  • Harry never legally adopted his godson, Teddy Lupin, (who was raised full-time by his grandmother Andromeda) but treats him like one of his own and the two of them are very close.
• Honor Harrington: Berry and Lars, two orphans rescued from the sewers of Chicago by Helen Zilwicki as a teenager, are happily adopted by her widowed father Anton (and by his girlfriend, Catherine). In stories set several years later, there's no doubt that Berry loves her parents and sister ferociously, and that feeling is reciprocated. Which is somewhat to the detriment of people who discover the utter stupidity of threatening Anton Zilwicki's daughter.
• In another S. M. Stirling work, Island in the Sea of Time, Marian Alston and her partner Swindapa adopt two Alban war orphans, Heather and Lucy. The girls are later seen to very much love, and be loved by, both of their mothers. Marian and Swindapa also adopt a baby boy near the end of the trilogy.
• Another one from Roald Dahl: James from James and the Giant Peach. His blood relatives, Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker, are horrifically cruel to James after his parents die. Later on (though more prominent in the 1996 movie than the book), James's new insect friends legally adopt him and prove to be very loving parental figures.
• In The Jeremiah School, the main character Peter Stone is happily adopted by his Uncle Donald and Aunt Dottie after his parents were killed in an accident (or so he was told), although he is treated like a lesser son compared to Peter's cousin, their own child Donald.
• Journey to Chaos: It's zigzagged with Zettai. At first, she's not at all happy with Basilard adopting her and says he's just as bad as her real dad, but that's because he insists that she's not his "daughter" but his "legal ward". In Mana Mutation Menace, he makes attempts to be a good dad and she wavers between accepting him as such and distancing herself for fear of him trying to manipulate her. By the end of the book, she's looking forward to a father-daughter-bonding vacation with him.
• Mowgli and his adoptive wolf family in The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. And in the end (by which time Mowgli is grown up, and his wolf parents are dead) he is reunited with Messua, a human woman who had briefly been his foster-mother, and decides to live with her and her baby son, especially as Messua's husband is now dead. So this makes Mowgli both a Child Substitute for Messua (who had originally fostered him because he reminded her of her first son, who was killed by a tiger) and a Parental Substitute for Messua's new baby.
• James Tock, the protagonist of the Dean Koontz novel Life Expectancy, is quite Happily Adopted. Considering that he comes from a birth family of evil acrobats and insane clowns, this is probably for the best.
  • Also Regina in Hideaway. She spends the first ten years of her life in a Catholic orphanage before being adopted by the Harrisons, who are very loving parents.
• In A Little Princess, Sara is adopted by her father's business partner in the end.
• In The Little White Horse Maria is adopted by her distant cousin, the much older Sir Benjamin Merryweather, after the death of her father. (Her mother died when she was a baby.) Since her father was a soldier and almost always away, Maria doesn't miss him much. Her main parental figure is her governess, Miss Heliotrope, who moves to the cousin's estate with her. As a result, she is very happy with the new situation.
• The Lotterys Plus One: It's established in this entry that Sumac is an adoptive child of the Lottery family. Her birth parents, Nenita and Jensen, weren't really ready to have a child of their own. But, being friends of the Lotterys, they gave her to them. She still keeps in touch with her birth parents, and seems to be on good terms with them, though.
  • The same appears to be the case with her younger siblings, Brian and Oak.
• Matilda: At the very end, Matilda is adopted by Ms. Honey and lives happily ever after.
• Rani of the Mermaids (2001) trilogy. Even when she does find her biological family, she decides to stay with her adoptive family.
• Metro 2033: Downplayed. Artyom loves "Uncle" Sukhoi, who took him in after his mother died, very much, but he never refers to Sukhoi as "father" but always as "Uncle". Also, Artyom and Sukhoi generally get along well, but they do have some pretty epic rows. And, Metro being what it is, happiness in general is in short supply.
• In Les Misérables, Cosette was perfectly happy to be raised by Jean Valjean (after escaping an admittedly less-than-ideal situation with the Thenardiers).
• Jace, by the Lightwoods in The Mortal Instruments. Granted, Maryse and Robert are not the most emotionally engaged of parents, but they do care for him greatly. His adoptive siblings all love him dearly. Clary lampshades this when he is angsting about his lack of a last name and she points out that he's always been Jace Lightwood.
• My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!: Keith wasn't this on the original Fortune Lover timeline, due to a few misunderstandings (he was born from an affair that a relative of Catarina's father had, and his wife mistakenly thought he was his biological child, so she took to lash out on him). However, when the new Catarina makes the events go Off the Rails, the misunderstanding is cleared up, not only fixing her parents' marriage, but also giving Keith an overall happy life as part of their family.
• This is the final happy ending for several of the characters in the The Mysterious Benedict Society books:
  • Reynie is adopted by his former tutor Miss Perumal.
  • Constance ends up adopted by Mr. Benedict.
  • It's revealed at the end of the first book that Rhonda and Number Two were adopted by Mr. Benedict as children.
• Nevermoor: Although she isn't formally adopted, Morrigan becomes the ward of Jupiter North and moves into the Hotel Deucalion, which he owns. She's much happier and better taken care of with Jupiter than she ever was living with her father, and shows no desire to ever see her father again. It helps that Jupiter actually likes Morrigan and doesn't view her as a burden.
• The Night Garden: Franny is Old Tom's and Sina's adopted daughter, having been left with them by someone who was to take her to someone else, but never came back to bring her to them. Regardless, Franny is quite happy living with them.
  • Zebediah was adopted by Crying Alice's family, and is quite happy living with them.
• In the children's novel Nooks and Crannies, this is true for several of the child characters, though the main protagonist, Tabitha Crum, is most definitely not this. None of them, however, actually know that they're adopted until it's revealed to them within the events of the book. Tabitha Crum's adoptive parents are so horrible that they almost make the Dursleys look good. They treat Tabitha like absolute vermin and the only reason they adopted her in the first place was because they hoped that she'd grow up to be pretty so that they could marry her off to somebody rich and become a part of high society themselves. When they decide that Tabitha is never going to be pretty enough, they decide to send her to an orphanage. It also transpires that they're petty criminals. At the end of the novel, it is revealed that Tabitha is the granddaughter of a rather wealthy woman and ends up being happily adopted by her grandmother, along with her long-lost twin brother.
• Electra of the Not Quite a Mermaid series by Linda Chapman. Also counts as Interspecies Adoption, as she was born human, but as a baby she was found in a boat by mermaids, and given magic sea powder so she could live underwater.
• Older Than Radio: Oliver Twist was adopted by the good Mr. Brownlow. Something of a twist (no pun intended) on the trope, however, since Mr. Brownlow turns out to be an old friend of Oliver's family who would have been Oliver's uncle-by-marriage had fate, in the form of the unbelievably complicated backstory, not intervened. (The musical Oliver!, as part of streamlining the unbelievably complicated backstory, makes him Oliver's biological grandfather.)
• Oona Out of Order: In 2015, the Unstuck in Time protagonist meets her assistant, Kenzie. Per his backstory, he had two moms who adopted him but died some time ago. In one of her leaps, Oona gets a chance to observe him as a teenager and realizes he is happy with Shivani and Faye.
• The Perfect Run: One of Felix's sisters is adopted. She is perfectly happy with her new family (except for the same amount of angst about the family business as her siblings), and dismisses her biological parents as raiders and rapists who she escaped. Actually, her parents were kind, gentle people who were trying to rebuild the world—but her father had a power that might be able to kill Augustus, so he killed them and all witnesses. She was only spared because he couldn't help but see the resemblance to his own daughter; he had one of his minions shatter her mind, then gave her to his lieutenants to raise as their own.
• In Renegades, Adrian was adopted by the superhero couple Captain Chromium and Dread Warden after his mother - another member of their Super Team - was killed, and he has no reservations about calling them his dads.
• In the The Saxon Stories Uthred and Brida end up being adopted by Ragnar the Fearless, who turns out to be quite the loving father.
• The Secret Garden doesn't start out with a happy adoption, as miserable sour 10-year-old Mary is sent to her only living relative, her uncle, after the death of her parents. Her uncle has little interaction with Mary, outside of doing his duty to his dead wife's sister's memory and ensuring Mary is provided for. However, after everyone is healed by the events of the story, Mary, her cousin Colin, and her uncle all become closer as a family and this is the assumed conclusion for them.
• In the Septimus Heap series, Jenna has a bit of a mild crisis when she learns that she's actually an adopted princess. In a sad state, she remarks to her adoptive brother Nickolas how nice it must be to have a mother and father. Her brother promptly tells her to stop being an idiot; she has a mother, father and brothers, and her being a princess won't ever change that.
  • Similarly, due to spending the first ten years of his life as a Child Soldier, Septimus himself is almost more of an adoptee than Jenna is, even though he's now living with his biological parents. Although he loves them, it's still somewhat strange for him.
• Or as happy as can be: Elrond and Elros from The Silmarillion (and The Lord of the Rings) were fostered by guys who tried to kill their mother and their grandparents before that.
  "...and love grew after between them, as little might be thought." (The Silmarillion, J. R. R. Tolkien)
  • Tuor is raised by the Grey-Elves of Mithrim after his mother left shortly after his birth to find his father; she dies of despair when she finds he is dead.
  • Also, Aragorn was adopted by Elrond after the death of his father. They were very fond of one another and Elrond was extremely proud of the man Aragorn grew to be, although there was tension between them later due to Aragorn falling in love with Elrond's daughter, Arwen.
• Hope in Sky Jumpers was adopted by the Toriella family. She is very happy to live with them.
• In The Ship Who... Searched, after Tia is paralyzed from the chin down thanks to Parental Neglect her parents are given an ultimatum - lose their job and stay with a seven year old who won't get better, or get back to work. They sign over her guardianship to one of her doctors and return to work. Said doctor really does his best by Tia, though! After he pulls strings to get her into the shellperson program there's a Time Skip of ten years or so. As a Sapient Ship she actually still has a good relationship with her parents and regards them as Good Parents - but it's Dr Kenny who actually appears on page, several times, as she confides in him and he gives her advice and loving care.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • Although their biological parents were still alive at that time, Eddard Stark and Robert Baratheon were fostered by Jon Arryn since they were kids. Jon didn't have children, so he considered the two his sons, a feeling that was reciprocated, with Eddard naming his bastard son after him, while Robert named Jon the Hand of the King upon taking the Iron Throne.
  • Theon Greyjoy eventually has this realization in A Dance with Dragons, after enduring a brutal and relentless torture by Ramsay Snow and reflecting all he has done. Despite spending most of A Clash of Kings denigrating them, Theon muses that he loves the Starks, wants to be a Stark, and doesn't consider his decade-long fostering by them to be a burden. Most of all, he wants to apologize to his sworn brother, Robb Stark, even though he is dead by that point.
• In the Sonic X: The New Adventures episode called “Sonic’s Love Problem” Sonic and Amy find a orphan hedgehog to raise themselves and named him Spike.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • Mandalorians take family very seriously, but bloodlines... not so much. Two of their proverbs translate to "It doesn't matter who your father is, but the father you will be" and "Family is more than blood."
  • Jedi Apprentice outlines that Jedi give up their birthrights and sever connections to their birth parents when they're picked to come to the Temple. The Temple becomes home, the Jedi become family, the invisible ties of loyalty to blood become the ties of duty to the Force. Really young children are taken if the visiting Jedi wants them and the parents agree; slightly older ones have to agree, too. Most are happy to be Jedi, and it's rare for children of Padawan age to spontaneously even think of their origins, though there are plenty of cases of Jedi who adorn themselves as their people do. That doesn't mean this trope isn't occasionally subverted. Individually, Jedi can't own property, be part of a government, marry, or pick sides without regarding the big picture. They're raised to accept all that, but sometimes one becomes discontent.
  • The films didn't have any real chance to show it, but the Expanded Universe makes it clear that both Skywalker twins were happy with their adopted families (even if Luke and his uncle didn't always get along, Luke still loved him as a parent and vice versa). The one time Anakin Skywalker appeared to Leia as a force ghost, she told him to his face that Bail Organa will always come first as her father.
• Starburst features an unofficial version of this, when retired filmmaker Leonard Hartson affirms to others that he sees his new assistant T.K. as the grandson he never had, with T.K. clearly reciprocating Leonard’s warm regard for him.
• In Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet, Lucy becomes John Ferrier's daughter in everything but blood after they become the last two survivors from a band of settlers crossing the desert.
• In Super Powereds, Vince's parents died when he was little. He then ended up in the foster system, however, his Power Incontinence eventually resulted in him ending up on the street, eating from garbage cans. He was found by a homeless man, who decided to adopt the boy as his own (not legally, of course) and raised him to be self-reliant, strong, and kind-hearted. Even after Vince learns that his father is the notorious criminal Globe, he still doesn't love him any less. In the fourth book, he also finds out that, by virtue of his adoption by Globe, he's Alice's cousin (their fathers are brothers). For bonus points, not a single person questions the fact that Vince wasn't the man's biological or wasn't legally adopted. He was the man's son, plain and simple.
• Several examples from the Tortall Universe by Tamora Pierce.
  • An adult variant occurs in Song of the Lioness when Myles of Olau formally adopts Alanna, having been a Parental Substitute during her page years. Her biological dad was rather neglectful of his children before he passed away.
  • In The Immortals, Skysong the dragon (nicknamed Kitten) is given to Daine after her true mother dies in battle. While some of the dragons are later quite displeased by the arrangement, Kitten herself couldn't be happier. Daine herself is practically adopted into Tortallan royalty — Alanna's children refer to her as their aunt in later books.
  • In the Trickster's Duet, the Balitang family. When Duke Mequen's first wife died, he eventually re-married to her best friend. He has four children, two from each wife, who love each other very dearly, despite significant differences in age and race.
• Tracy Beaker, sort of. Life with Cam isn't perfect, but in The Dare Game, Cam is shown as a much better mother figure than Tracy's biological mother.
• Sigurd in the Poetic Edda and Volsunga Saga was adopted by the dwarf Regin and has a fairly close bond with him.
• In The Twilight Saga, the Cullen family basically adopts each new member. The cover story used when the story begins is that the high-schoolers are all adopted children. Nevertheless, Carlisle and Esme consider the rest of their family as their own kids, and the others all regard them as parents.
• Deconstructed in Sharon Creech's The Wanderer. Sophie is very happy with her adopted family... so happy, in fact that she begins to think of them as her only family and constantly ignores and suppresses any notions that she is adopted. Only in the end (and after suffering a huge storm just like the one which killed her parents does she come to terms with the fact that she is an adopted orphan, which is a huge Tear Jerker.
• In Warrior Cats:
  • Mistyfoot and Stonefur were adopted by the RiverClan cat Graypool, who had just lost her own kits. They grew up believing that she actually was their mother.
  • Brindleface adopts Cloudkit when Cloudkit's mother gives him up to be raised as a Clan cat.
  • In Dawn of the Clans, Gray Wing raises Thunder as his own after Thunder's mother dies and his father abandons him. He also adopts Turtle Tail's three kits, and especially feels protective of them after her death.
  • Also in Dawn of the Clans, a rogue is killed by Clear Sky's cats, and afterward they realize she had two kits. The kits, Birch and Alder, are raised by Petal, one of Clear Sky's cats.
• V.I. Warshawski's friend Dr. Charlotte "Lotty" Herschel was evacuated from Nazi Germany with her little brother to stay with an aunt in the UK. The aunt is a vicious, mean person and had only agreed to take Lotty, not the brother, whom she farms out to an employee. The employee's family give the brother a loving warm childhood, in sharp contrast to Lotty's upbringing with the aunt.
• Rand al'Thor in The Wheel of Time series gets over his "is-he-or-isn't-he-my-father" angst regarding adoptive father Tam al'Thor relatively quickly, concluding that Tam is his father no matter what their blood relation is or isn't. He fully acknowledges Kari al'Thor as his mother, too.
  • In the most recent book, he even attributes the fact that he's able to successfully pass through his Heroic BSoD to good upbringing.
• In the Wings of Fire series, there's Bumblebee. She begins her life as an orphaned egg in the HiveWing's collective hatchery; Cricket steals her away in order to to protect her from being turned into an Unwitting Pawn by the Queen, using her Hive Mind abilities. She hatches while Cricket and her friends are on the run, and quickly and happily takes to her strange, ragtag family.
  • The original Dragonets of Destiny also fit this trope, of the 5 dragonets, their caretakers may have been kinda terrible but the dragonets regard each other as family.
• While the Disney version lives on his own, the Tigger in the original Winnie the Pooh books is this, living with Kanga and Roo, Roo treating him like a big brother and Kanga showing him the same care she does to her biological son. Can also count for Interspecies Adoption.
• In Andre Norton's Witch World novel The Jargoon Pard, although Gillian and Herrel reclaim their son, they do not give up Aylinn, who was switched with him.
• The picture book Zombie in Love 2+1 is about a doorstop baby being adopted by Mortimer and Mildred, the newlywed zombies. They are initially confused over how they're even supposed to raise a baby at all (let alone a human one), but come to adore him over time, and the baby loves them in return.
• In Silas Marner, the title character literally finds a young child wandering into his house for help after her mother collapses in a snowstorm. Their first meeting goes so well, that Silas is worried that the toddler will be taken away from him to be raised by a more traditional family (he is a curmudgeonly loner who has never had children). But little Hephzibah is left in his care, and they bond so strongly that she will not leave him, even when her titled father is finally ready to publicly acknowledge her.

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