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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. Thereβs a teenage birth mother in Texas who signs away her parental rights on a napkin only to later reconsider, crushing the hopes of her babyβs adoptive parents. Beam then paints an unprecedented portrait of the intricacies of growing up in the systemβthe 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 systemβs 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.
 Media BuzzOn Point - August 30, 2013
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