"I had the privilege of meeting a long-time foster parent once - the biological mother of a college friend - who gave me this book after an afternoon of harrowing and mesmerizing stories. It often feels like mention of the foster system in pop culture is dominated by its failings: abuses, accountability deficits, overburdened social workers, revolving doors of indifferent caretakers trying to game the system. What's lost in these narratives are the people and families who open their doors and their lives to children with nothing. They push through the traumas that bring children to them anywhere from infancy to early adulthood in a job that's often thankless and excruciatingly painful. Another Place at the Table captures the care and joy that drive foster families: people who truly believe that every child deserves a home, a family, and a chance to be loved."
Publisher Penguin
Publication Date 2004-05-24
Section Sociology / All Staff Suggestions / Nonfiction Suggestions / Melissa S.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9781585422821
The startling and ultimately uplifting narrative of one woman's thirteen-year experience as a foster parent.
For more than a decade, Kathy Harrison has sheltered a shifting cast of troubled youngsters-the offspring of prostitutes and addicts; the sons and daughters of abusers; and teenage parents who aren't equipped for parenthood. All this, in addition to raising her three biological sons and two adopted daughters. What would motivate someone to give herself over to constant, largely uncompensated chaos? For Harrison, the answer is easy.
Another Place at the Table is the story of life at our social services' front lines, centered on three children who, when they come together in Harrison's home, nearly destroy it. It is the frank first-person story of a woman whose compassionate best intentions for a child are sometimes all that stand between violence and redemption.
