Hope's Boy

David Drummond's delivery of narrative is straightforward and well paced. In delivering dialogue, however, heartfelt emotions color his reading. In this memoir young Andy is taken from his mother, Hope, when she shows neither the mental nor financial ability to care for him. Drummond's portrayal of Andy has the longing and wistfulness of a son who adores his mother and grieves their parting. In foster homes, Drummond portrays Andy as a good boy, despite his subtle defiance. One foster mother, Mrs. Leonard, is easily enraged, and Drummond's harsh Germanic tones for her character are effectively menacing. He is also spot-on in his characterizations of the social workers who do little to aid the boy's suffering. S.W. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

October 29, 2007
In this memoir of a decade spent in foster care, Bridge illuminates the horrors of a system that, in its clumsy attempts to save children, he argues, all too frequently condemns them to physical and emotional abuse. The child of a teenage mother who divorced her abusive husband soon after Bridge was born, he watched helplessly as his mother disintegrated under the impact of isolation and poverty. At the age of seven, Bridge was dragged away from his mother, literally, by police and warehoused in an enormous California juvenile facility patrolled by armed guards. The state eventually transferred him to a foster family dominated by an obese, bullying Estonian woman who had survived imprisonment in Dachau as a child. At 17, as he prepared to leave foster care for college and freedom, Bridge finally had a reunion with the mother he never stopped missing. In his narration of this unending nightmare, Bridge shows particular skill in portraying his isolation and the defenses he constructed to survive it. He also has a talent for grotesques, particularly that of the monstrous foster mother who revisited the misery of her upbringing on her foster children. Bridge’s obsessive focus on his loneliness and his two “mothers” is so intense that a more balanced picture of his life fails to emerge and his attachment to another foster child remains unexplained. Yet Bridge, a Harvard Law School graduate who has devoted his career to children’s rights, has provided remarkable insights into a dark corner of American society.