This is a great memoir.
This is written so well. It’s so moving.
The author has shown her vulnerability and it is filled with emotion

Stranger Care is a novel about navigating the foster system, told from the prospective of two mothers, the birth mother and the foster mother. The novel is a roller coaster ride which makes us question what makes a mother. A must-read if you want to know more about foster care.

Sarah and Eric Sentilles make the decision not to have a biological child. Instead, they go through the long and intense process of becoming foster parents. They are thrilled to finally get a call about fostering a baby girl named Coco. The couple welcomes her into their home and makes her a part of their family. And so begins the painful process of getting to know and love a child who was, as Sarah points out, "never ours, yet we belong to each other."

Stranger Care is a difficult, but important, read. Sentilles is honest about the roller coaster of emotions that she experienced as she came to love this child while also knowing that Coco would likely be reunified with her family. Is it possible to love a child and prepare to let them go at the same time? Sarah and Eric bond with Coco's mother Evelyn and cheer her on as she tries to overcome a drug addiction and find a steady job. In other moments, they quietly hope that Evelyn will fail so they can keep the little girl who has captured their hearts. Stranger Care is an unflinching look at the complications of our foster care system, the lack of staff and resources to care for these children, and the uneasy compromises that biological and foster parents make as they try to do what is best for a child they love.

Stranger Care
A Memoir of Loving What Isn't Ours
By Sarah Sentilles
Random House May 2021
400 pages
Read via Netgalley

Great book. Highly recommend and will most defiantly read more by this author and suggest to others!

Ok, so this one is a little tricky to navigate. While I did understand where the author was coming from, all she wanted was to share her love and to have someone to love, I do not support, AT ALL, her entitlement to get there. Nor do I support a lot of the things that occurred in this book that I believe were directly related to privilege and the color of her skin. As a white woman, I know it's much easier for us in the court system, and it's much easier for us to be listened to. In fact, we are the ones MOST listened to and heard. And this worked for the author, and against the mother of her foster daughter. It got to the point where the author's desperation to have a child was so bad, that I wanted any child to not be with her. It was disturbing to me.

I get the idea of wanting to love and wanting to share love. But at some point, she needed to see how toxic she was and her behavior. But it didn't seem (in this books) as if she ever did.

The dynamics here are really hard for me to digest and I'm not really sure (even a few months after reading this book and now writing a review) how to react to it.

3/5 Stars

Sentilles’ writing is gripping and I could not put this book down. I rode the emotional ups and downs as she and Eric grappled with the broken foster care system and their expanding love for the child. I felt her rage as she encountered the baffling system and inept employees. Sentilles is extraordinarily raw in assessing herself and others and in some cases, I found her mean-spirited and judgemental and in others, deeply empathetic and kind. Her writing will bring you along as you share her joy, grief and heartbreak. I could have done with less of the nature stories but they did break up the emotional intensity of the story.

This ARC was provided by @netgalley and @text_publishing. The opinions are my own.

Stranger Care by Sarah Sentilles is an affecting and beautifully vulnerable memoir that documents her experience leading up to and becoming a foster parent. Sentilles and her husband decide to become foster parents for simultaneously altruistic and selfish reasons. They want a baby, but do not want to bring another child into the world. At first, they don’t fully comprehend that in order for them to get a foster child, something has to go horribly wrong for another family. The majority of people who apply to become foster parents are related to a child currently in the foster care system. When foster parents are not related to a child that they are fostering, this is considered “stranger care.”

The memoir is separated by chapter into a collection of short vignettes. Sandwiched between the author’s experiences are ruminations on so many things relating to their journey, largely examples from the natural world. This reminded me a little of Wintering by Katherine May. The author is clearly very thoughtful and educated on a myriad of subjects. Sentilles shines a light on the issues with the foster care system, such as overextended social workers, inconsistent polices, and family reunification even when it may not be in the best interest of the child. Sentilles documents her contradictory thoughts and emotions over this process in such a clear, delicate manner. As a parent, it was at times incredibly heartbreaking to read. She gets to know the biological mother of the child that is placed with them, but has trouble with her conflicting emotions. How can you support and hope for a child’s mother to get better and yet keep her child from her? What is the best action and how do you cope with constant uncertainty? The couple goes through so much with the foster care system and the child’s biological parents. Stranger Care is a truly profound memoir that fully expresses the love parents have for their children.

Thank you Random House / Text Publishing for providing this ARC.

Motherhood looks different for everyone. In Stranger Care, Sarah Sentilles shares the experience she and her husband, Eric, had after deciding not to have biological children and to instead adopt through the foster care system. After years of fits and starts and an interstate move, Sarah and Eric become licensed foster parents and welcome a three day old baby, Coco, into their home.

And as Coco becomes a part of their lives, so too does Coco’s mother, the courts, and countless providers. Sarah explores questions including: how do we mother alongside someone else? How do we prepare simultaneously for something that could be either temporary or permanent? How do we attach if the bond is transient?

I’m so glad that I read this memoir. It is raw, and real, and heartbreaking, and hopeful. It explores, fairly, the way that foster care often goes, and the complex emotions connected to things like visitation, reunification, and uncertainty.

Personally, I’ve strongly considered foster care and/or adoption as my potential path to parenting. Professionally, I worked in therapeutic foster care recruitment and training earlier in my career, and now clinically work with birth parents, adoptive families, kinship caregivers, children and youth in foster care, and adoptees. I chuckled as Sarah described the activities in her training because they were so familiar (especially the sculpt exercise), and I shuddered at some of the things child welfare professionals said during the home study process and after. I felt it all as I thought about families that I’ve known that have experienced things from Sarah’s perspective, and from Evelyn’s. I saw Sarah’s perception grow and shift, and the way that understanding didn’t lessen the pain but increased empathy.

Throughout it all, Sentilles shares information about the ways in which the history of child welfare in the United States is problematic, and weaves in stories about kinship and caregiving in nature.

I loved this book, and think it’s an important read for anyone considering adoption via foster care, or foster care in general. While Sentilles has a theology background, this book is not religious (though there are a few mentions of religious themes in a historical context, Sentillies openly discusses her distancing from organized religion).

Thank you Netgalley for this ARC of Stranger Care by Sarah Sentilles.

Has it been a while since you've had your guts torn out? Need a good cry? Pick up this beautifully heartbreaking story of a woman's experience as a foster parent.

Sarah and Eric have decided that their role as parents on this earth will be to love children who have been dealt bad cards. The best way to do this is by enrolling as foster parents, with the hope to adopt. Through this experience, Sarah recounts all of the positive and negative experiences she had taking courses, dealing with CASA, home visits, phone calls, inattentive social workers, and finally getting her first foster baby Coco. Now she must navigate Coco's mother, the courts, and hardest of all, falling in love with this newborn angel who may or may not get to be a part of Sarah and Eric's life forever.

Wow, Sarah Sentilles does SUCH a good job sharing her experience as a foster mom, so important, so HARD. In between her chapters she shares different stories of mothering and nurturing in other cultures, as well as from the earth itself. It's absolutely beautiful.

So many thoughts about this book. Perhaps the most surprising to me is that the author’s experience fostering a baby in Idaho parallels my experience fostering a 3 year old in New England almost exactly - everything from the distracted and disinterested (often dishonest) social workers, to the total disregard accorded foster parents, to the chaos of the family group meeting, to the rapid (and often random) reunification plan with total disregard for the best interest of the child. It is a grim system, and I really appreciated the effort Sentilles made to chronicle this harrowing, heartbreaking journey. She gets the details right, and this should be required reading for anyone considering foster parenting (especially if your real hope is to adopt).

That said, the never-ending string of asides about birds and rhinos and elephants and testing on monkeys....and the several weird tangents about the mothering instincts of trees....and the story of a woman who inserted the parts of a dismembered rabbit into herself then pretended to give birth to them (in order to escape poverty)?!? These detracted from the narrative, to say the least. I”m not sure what the point was of any of this. To create breathing space in the midst of a suffocating story, perhaps? To convince us that we’re all connected (she claims such connection with whales and a canoe at one point, but by then I was just skimming these sections). Editing reality would have helped here, as the author did a great job of drawing us in to this compelling story, only to fling us out again and again into these strange claims and anecdotes. In this way, this book is BIZARRE.

That said...the part about fostering - what it’s really like - is worth the time and attention required to skim the weird parts for anyone considering entering this world.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Beautiful, and also heartbreaking book.

Thanks to author, publisher and NetGalley for the chance to read this book. While I got the book for free, it had no bearing on the rating I gave it.

When you finally acknowledge what you truly want in your life and take steps toward that desire, things don't always go as you'd like. When you have someone thrust into your life that you never thought you could deal with, life changes. Such are the lives of Eric and Sarah when they become other parents. So many up and downs become parts of their lives. They wanted a child to love, but got much more, including the adoptive mother, the DHS department of Idaho, the courts, the physicians, and their own hearts. Coco's story shows not only what we think of as family, but also other forms of family, including animals, nature, and a system that bends in every day to reunite children with their biological families. Stranger Care is a story that leads to all-night reading.

Loving what isn't yours - has it ever been worth it?
Stranger Care is a beautiful and touching exploration of parenthood and what it means to be emotionally invested in a relationship that you know doesn't belong to you. The passionately written memoir takes you through Sarah’s desire to embark the journey of pregnancy and motherhood, which simultaneously contrasts with her partner’s ideologies that are against the idea of conceiving more children into a world that has a fair share of children who are dispossessed. This dissension leads them to consider the option of being foster parents.
Through the course of this memoir we are introduced to the laws of foster care in the States and the harsh realities that Sarah had to accept about being a foster mother to a child who could possibly never be hers. She constantly questions how the line between the two is blurred and if tagging the term “foster” makes the journey of parenthood different. We also get a glance of how the emotional stages of embracing parenthood develops over time and how it differs starkly between Sarah and her husband. The descriptions of these moments are truly brilliant.
In my opinion this was a truly touching and tear jerking memoir that makes you question the right and wrong when it comes to ownership of the life of a child - be it yours or not. I enjoyed the similarities drawn with nature's course of motherhood throughout the book. The intermediate sections about nature’s instinct to habituate to changes in order to protect the proliferation of its offsprings, was an interesting tool to draw parallels to Sarah’s attachment to her foster daughter, Coco.
The maturation of the story and emotions was well-articulated and this memoir did an impeccable job at persuading me to emotionally invest in this episode of Sarah’s life. I would love to read more from Sarah’s backlists and can’t wait for the world to read this heart stirring memoir.
Thank you Netgalley & Text publishing for the arc!

3.5 stars for me. This is a raw and honest looks into the foster care system from the perspective of a foster care mother. Some of it was hard to read but I recognize it is her account and is shared as such. Some of the things shared were things I disagreed with but I enjoyed reading about her experience.

" "Do you have kids?" strangers asked almost every day.

"No," I said, not wanting to explain, because, really, it's an unimaginative question, full of their beliefs about what family means, about who counts as kin, and it's a hard question for anyone with a complicated relationship to family making, for those of us who've experienced miscarriage or failed adoptions or the death of a child, for those of us estranged or embattled or in grief. It's a question I now refuse to ask. "Tell me about your family," I say instead, because I know belonging comes in all shapes and sizes, visible and invisible, hidden and made and chosen and found."

This book called to me, but I wasn't sure I was ready for it. It has only been a few years since my husband and I decided not to pursue other pathways to parenthood when we learned biological children were not in the cards for us. Fostering felt like a beautiful thing for people who could care for a child and then give them back - and it was clear that wouldn't be something we could do. So when I saw the option to read and review an advance reader copy - I wasn't sure if I could even read about the joy and heartbreak of foster parenting.

The prose is beautiful and chapters short - and quite honestly I'm not sure my heart could have taken this story without frequent pauses to sob and breathe. I first cried on the first page, and my sobs didn't let up in the last 25% - and I feel like my heart and perspective has expanded. I'm grateful to bear witness to this story.

"Why are we doing this?...Because I want to live in a world where we take care of each other."

Yes. This. All of this.

Stranger Care by Sarah Sentilles is a moving memoir about the experience of fostering a child, loving that child but having to give her back to her birth mother.

Simply stunning. Beautiful, emotional and yet informative too. It really made me think about society, about the world we live in, about different kinds of love, about understanding. And it made me question my own biases, beliefs and morals and think about how I could be a better person. Thank you to the author for being so searingly honest and true.

As a foster carer, I was initially sceptical about this book. Foster care memoirs and stories often draw on the same images - kids with their belongings on rubbish bags, incompetent social workers, saviour (often white) parents coming to fix the lives of poor, harmed, children.

However this book is different- it brings to light an important narrative about choosing to adopt rather than to have your own children, even when you could do that. More importantly, it doesn’t shy away from the important issues of systemic discrimination against birth families, particularly for black, minority and native parents.

The observation, early in the book, that the foster care recruitment system hasn’t changed much in 30 years is too true. The book will be painful reading for any foster carer who is critically engaged in the issues of family separation and birth parent rights - because it’s a thoughtful story, and because it highlights how much work there is to do in order to make significant progress and properly support birth families towards reunification. The journey the author goes through in the book is one that is needed across the whole of society- I am grateful that this memoir exists and can hopefully begin to change attitudes about what fostering is all about.

What makes this book special is how the story of the author’s journey is mixed with a wider narrative. This includes nature and historical accounts that bring to life the best and the worst of our own humanity.

A must read for anyone who wants to hear about different approaches to making a family, the flaws of the system that attempts to advance family reunification and how to navigate those challenges as a foster family.

The way the book is formatted is that this is the story of Sarah’s journey of becoming a foster carer with her husband and her first placement. Interwoven with human history, different people’s experiences, animal and plant experiences of looking after each other.

I wish the book was just Sarah’s story as it would have been five stars, informative, demonstrative and illuminating look at the foster care process. It made me feel all of the feelings.

Some of the interwoven facts were interesting but the majority for me broke up the narrative in a negative way.