To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care (ALA Notable Books for Adults)

Beam, Cris

ISBN 10: 0151014124 / ISBN 13: 9780151014125

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 0151014124-3-33184365

Bibliographic Details

• Title: To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care (ALA Notable Books for Adults)
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication Date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151014124
• ISBN 13: 9780151014125
• Binding: hardcover
• Condition: Good
• Weight: 19 ounces

About this title

Synopsis

"A triumph of narrative reporting and storytelling. . . .  Beam gives [foster children] a much-needed voice and does what too many adults in the foster-care system can't, or won't: She advocates for them." -- New York Times Book Review
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.

About the Author

Cris Beam is the author of several award-winning books, including To The End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care, and Transparent: Love, Family and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers. Her journalism has been featured in several national magazines and on public radio. Beam teaches creative writing at Columbia, NYU, and Bayview Women's Correctional Facility and lives in New York City.