Hope's Boy

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.

November 15, 2007
In this memoir of a dysfunctional upbringing, Bridge, a Harvard Law School graduate, successfully employs the technique of first presenting an event of the near present, then going back in time to disclose the details of his childhood. As he relates in the prolog, he was involved as a lawyer in a case against an Alabama facility housing teenagers in state care who, though they were not juvenile delinquents, were being treated as such. Knowing that Bridge managed to rise above his unfortunate childhood helps the reader cope with the narration that follows. Bridge first lived with his grandmother until the age of five, while his parents were in prison for check fraud; then he spent two years with his mentally deranged mother before landing for 11 years in foster care, where he endured meanness and loneliness. He kept to himself at school and excelled at his schoolwork, entirely unbeknown to either his foster parents or the foster-care system until, at the age of 18, Bridge won a college scholarship. He went on to attend law school, was a Fulbright Scholar, and later became the CEO/general counsel of the Alliance for Children's Rights. An inspiring account recommended for high school and public libraries.Dorris Douglass, Williamson Cty. P.L., Franklin, TN

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