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Stranger Care
Stranger Care: A Memoir of Loving What Isn't Ours | Sarah Sentilles
5 posts | 5 read | 9 to read
A powerful, heartbreaking, necessary masterpiece.Cheryl Strayed, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Wild The moving story of what one woman learned from fostering a newbornabout injustice, about making mistakes, about how to better love and protect people beyond our immediate kin May you always feel at home. After their decision not to have a biological child, Sarah Sentilles and her husband, Eric, decide to adopt via the foster care system. Despite knowing that the systems goal is the childs reunification with the birth family, Sarah opens their home to a flurry of social workers who question them, evaluate them, and ultimately prepare them to welcome a child into their liveseven if it means most likely having to give the child back. After years of starts and stops, and endless navigation of the complexities and injustices of the foster care system, a phone call finally comes: a three-day-old baby girl named Coco, in immediate need of a foster family. Sarah and Eric bring this newborn stranger home. You were never ours, Sarah tells Coco, yet we belong to each other. A love letter to Coco and to the countless children like her, Stranger Care chronicles Sarahs discovery of what it means to motherin this case, not just a vulnerable infant but the birth mother who loves her, too. Ultimately, Cocos story reminds us that we depend on family, and that family can take different forms. With prose that Nick Flynn has called fearless, stirring, rhythmic, Sentilles lays bare an intimate, powerful story with universal concerns: How can we care for and protect one another? How do we ensure a more hopeful future for life on this planet? And if were all relatedtree, bird, star, personhow might we better live?
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jlhammar
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💗Books move me to tears all the time. Tagged memoir is one that had me sobbing.
💗Literary fiction—thoughtful, meditative, often experimental, can get to the truth of things in a way nonfiction can‘t. I do also love nonfiction though, crime/mysteries, graphic novels, historical fiction, classics and children‘s literature.
💗I could never pick one best, but Lila by Marilynne Robinson is one of my favorites.

#WondrousWednesday
@Eggs

Eggs Thanks for the thoughtful responses 👏🏻📖👍🏼 2y
Kristin_Reads Lila is a favorite of mine too! 2y
jlhammar @Kristin_Reads I loved all of the Gilead books, but Lila was definitely the stand-out for me. I also thought Housekeeping was wonderful. 2y
38 likes3 comments
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jlhammar
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#12Booksof2021 Read this beautiful memoir back in June. Gripping, honest, powerful. I could not stop turning the pages. Moved me to tears.

15 likes2 stack adds
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jlhammar
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#top21of21 part 2
Not pictured: Stranger Care-S. Sentilles, Paying the Land-J. Sacco

melissajayne I‘ve heard Empire of Pain is excellent. 3y
Chelsea.Poole I want to read Brood! 3y
Reggie Hmmm Empire of Pain is on a lot of lists. 3y
28 likes3 comments
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ReadingEnvy
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Pickpick

Wow, this book. After a failed placement earlier this year, I couldn't face it, and now in the middle of a foster situation (one that we hope leads to adoption), this book resonated with my experience in the state system even though she's talking about Oregon and then Idaho. ↘️

ReadingEnvy Idaho prioritizes kinship and reunification at the highest rates in the country although I'd guess SC is not far behind, and this has an impact on how decisions are made by the state agents, the judges, the attorneys. ↘️ 3y
ReadingEnvy I think we all know foster care is a huge need and high turnover arena, both for families and workers. The system is highly flawed and there are so many children in bad situations, but she does a good job looking at the nuance of granting a government agency power to weigh in on whether a parent is "good enough" - ↘️ 3y
ReadingEnvy this has led to terrible things as well, but this also means children are too often returned to homes that are at high risk for continued neglect. How can an overworked and understaffed agency make the right decisions?↘️ 3y
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ReadingEnvy It also captures how foster families are treated - the hard sell to recruit but then once you're in the system you're told it's "not about you." There are so many things happening behind the scenes that foster parents don't have access to, and a child can be removed from your home for many reasons.↘️ 3y
ReadingEnvy And then there are all the little tricks people employ to find the babies everyone wants to adopt, leading to a lot of heartbreak. In the book, they have an infant but don't get to keep her, and along the way get to know the birth mother.

Unlike Instant Mom by Nia Vardalos, I'm not sure this will sell anyone on becoming a foster parent, but maybe it's better to know what it's really like.
3y
BookDadGirlDad @ReadingEnvy I applaud you fostering and wanting to adopt. My 3 girls were all adopted out of the foster care system. We did foster care for 6 roller coaster years. It is hard but so worth it. 3y
ReadingEnvy @BookDadGirlDad wow that's great. Were your girls siblings to start with or did you build to three? 3y
BookDadGirlDad @ReadingEnvy We built to 3. They're sisters to the core except DNA. 😁😁😁 3y
ReadingEnvy @BookDadGirlDad love it. The boys we are trying to adopt are technically second cousins but think of each other as brothers. 3y
Centique I hope it‘s going well Jenny! Sending you lots of aroha and best wishes 💕 3y
ReadingEnvy @Centique 💃❤️ 3y
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ElleSkel
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About half way through this one and I don‘t want to put it down. It is a memoir written in short, sometimes single page chapters that make up the larger sections of the author‘s journey through the adoption process. There are tidbits thrown in about the relationships between trees and birds and the basic nature of things used to echo and demonstrate author‘s experiences that I really love. So far this book has been thoroughly engaging for me!

Tamra Adoption is not for the faint of heart! 💜 From reading the blurb it appears the author would agree. 3y
ElleSkel @Tamra Yes unfortunately in this memoir the author is trying to adopt a baby in Idaho and they push her into fostering. What made things so difficult for her was that being a reunification state it was not likely that a foster would become an adoptive parent. This story really sheds some light on how broken the system can be while at the same time teaches us what a gift it can be to be able to help a child in need, even for just a little while. 3y
Tamra I will have to check this one out, though it sounds like a hard read. 3y
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