Sentenced to Survive (Paperback)

Paperback. James Vanderpool's first memory isn't a lullaby - it's the sound of metal tearing apart. He was conceived the same weekend his mother's car flipped in a field, and he says the wreck marked him before he ever took a breath. It set the tone for everything that came after.By age two he was living with his grandmother. By eleven he was cycling through group homes. His father was serving 25-to-life in California's maximum-security system, present only as a shadow over the family he'd left behind. His mother was fighting her own war. And James was left to build a self out of whatever pieces he could find - a foster home with people who "had no business taking in kids," a grandfather's boots on a hallway floor, a BMX track at Woodward Park that became the only gate he ever lined up at with something to prove.Sentenced to Survive follows that life in full - the running, the racing, the relationships that stayed even when he gave them every reason to leave, the addiction that took hold and never fully let go, and the honor dorm where he tried to become someone the system hadn't already written off. It follows him to the day his sister Rachael was killed, and to the ninety clean days he built afterward, and to day ninety-three, when he relapsed anyway.This is not a redemption story with a bow on it. James is upfront from the first page: he is still in the fight as he writes this, with no guarantee of how it ends. What he offers instead is something harder to find and harder to fake - a completely honest reckoning with a life shaped by incarceration, the foster system, addiction, and grief, told by someone who refused to let the courts, the counselors, or the case files be the ones to write his story.For readers of unflinching memoirs like Educated, The Glass Castle, or Beautiful Boy - this is a story about what it actually looks like to keep showing up, one uncertain day at a time. A raw, unvarnished look at a life shaped by the foster system and addiction, following a man's relentless struggle to reclaim his identity from the wreckage of a broken childhood. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our Sydney, NSW warehouse or from our UK or US warehouse, depending on stock availability.…