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The Intimate Life of American Foster Care
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
August 2013
On Sale: August 13, 2013
288 pages
ISBN: 0151014124
EAN: 9780151014125
Kindle: B009JWCRJC
Paperback / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
Who are the children of foster care? What, as a country, do
we owe them? Cris Beam, a foster mother herself, spent five
years immersed in the world of foster care, looking into
these questions and tracing firsthand stories. The result is
To the End of June, an unforgettable portrait that
takes us deep inside the lives of foster children at the
critical points in their search for a stable, loving
family.
The book mirrors the life cycle of a foster
child and so begins with the removal of babies and kids from
birth families. There’s a teenage birth mother in Texas who
signs away her parental rights on a napkin only to later
reconsider, crushing the hopes of her baby’s adoptive
parents. Beam then paints an unprecedented portrait of the
intricacies of growing up in the system—the back-and-forth
with agencies, the shuffling between pre-adoptive homes and
group homes, the emotionally charged tug of prospective
adoptive parents and the fundamental pull of birth parents.
And then what happens as these system-reared kids become
adults? Beam closely follows a group of teenagers in New
York who are grappling with what aging out will mean for
them and meets a woman who has parented eleven kids from the
system, almost all over the age of eighteen, and all still
in desperate need of a sense of home and
belonging.
Focusing intensely on a few foster
families who are deeply invested in the system’s success,
To the End of June is essential for humanizing and
challenging a broken system, while at the same time it is a
tribute to resiliency and offers hope for real change.
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