When journalist Tricia Booker and her husband had trouble conceiving, they followed the well-worn footsteps of couples exploring in-vitro fertilization. Two years and thousands of dollars later, they decided to have a long fulfilling life - without children. 

Instead, they became immersed in the world of international adoption. Their first child, born in Vietnam, introduced them to exotic travel and a poor but loving orphanage where infants slept with their caretakers. 

Then came Guatemala, a beautiful, impoverished country where Booker’s two younger children lived in tiny cribs with so little human interaction that they repeatedly rubbed their heads back and forth on the mattress just to be able to feel. 

In candid, raw prose, Booker tells the story of her family, including her son’s diagnosis of Anxious-Attachment Disorder, the service dog she trained to help him, and her and her husband’s chaotic attempts to simplify their lives in order to heal their son. 

Tricia Booker is an award-winning journalist and writer of creative nonfiction who lives in Ponte Vedra, Florida with her two daughters, one son and a dog. She has written for many publications including Notre Dame Magazine, Folio Weekly, Minnesota's Law & Politics and the Vero Beach Press-Journal. She has taught creative writing to middle schoolers and inmates and journalism to college students. She's currently a boxing instructor, part-time college professor and dedicated domestic engineer.

“Tricia Booker’s A Place of Peace and Crickets is a richly moving mediation on the unexpected heartbreaks and joys that accompany the creation of a family—and how those painful closed doors can sometimes open breathtakingly beautiful windows in a life. A Place of Peace and Crickets is a blisteringly honest, very funny, and totally unforgettable memoir.” -- Laura van den Berg, author of Find Me

“With honesty, humor, and an abundance of modern American zeitgeist, journalist Tricia Booker recounts her personal history with infertility, modern fertility miracles, international adoptions, grievous attachment disorders, and the joy and despair of that old universal theme: love. Her voice is wry, brutal and authentic enough to draw real tears. She tells the story of her family, and how they came to be, and how they survived being. In the process she tells an amazing story of heroism and defeat, closely intertwined.” -- Janis Owens, author of American Ghost