A 2026 IndieReader Discovery Award Winner — True Crime | 2026 Eric Hoffer Finalist | 2026 Next Generation Indie Book Award Finalist | 2026 Indies Today Finalist WONDERLAND: MEMOIR OF A BLACK MARKET ADOPTION is the story of one bartered baby who refused to be erased. Some adoptees spend their lives wondering about their origins. Patricia Knight Meyer spent hers wondering how she came to be trafficked on the black market. Handed over along a Texas hospital curb in 1970, no judge, no paperwork, no legal record of any kind, Patricia grew up celebrating a made-up birthday. Her parents, blackmailed by the attorney they hired to skirt the adoption system, faced an impossible choice: go to the police or pay up. They paid $30,000 to keep their paperless baby. Navigating her mother's violent alcoholism and caring for her disabled 600-pound father, Patricia spent her childhood trying to save her saviors, unaware of the lifelong threat that haunted them: at any moment, someone could come back for their child. Never legally adopted, Patricia used a fraudulent birth certificate for 47 years. Part detective story, part searing family portrait, part historical reckoning, WONDERLAND exposes what happens when maternal desperation meets need and greed, when falsified documents, dark family secrets, and systemic abuses can no longer sustain one woman's relentless search for truth. A tumble down the rabbit hole of America's baby trade, Patricia delivers a haunting reckoning with Baby Scoop Era exploitation that asks: as reproductive rights disappear, are we ready for Baby Scoop 2.0?