There are a myriad of problems with transracial adoption. Adoptees already grow up with a plethora of problems, before you add in the issue of race. In this worst case scenario, a white married couple who adopted six Black children from two different Texas families commits murder-suicide, thus ruining the children's only chance at happiness and survival. According to family and case workers, there were signs of abuse. Why didn't anyone go in and help? Why weren't these children placed with family members?

Enter in with care, friends. This is an emotionally distressing read.

We Were Once a Family isn’t going to give you deep insight into the behavior of Jennifer and Sarah Hart, which is fine, because how can we ever really comprehend their behavior? They are gone and so are the children whose lives they dramatically affected. We cannot gain from what was lost.

Instead, journalist Roxanna Asgarian dug deeper into the other question: How could two women who would go on to murder their children be granted the right to adopt those children through an institution that exists to protect them?

Please note that this book largely criticized the welfare system in Texas, with some critique aimed at the state where the Harts resided. We should be able to read this with nuance, knowing that CPS and the court system operate differently from state to state, but also knowing that the system is flawed as a whole in other ways. That does not mean, however, that the individualized criticism in this book applies to every state. What we can take away from this is that there are cracks in the system. Without a willingness to consider that, we rest too easily in the belief that it is doing all that it should be doing.

This is a profoundly tragic story. I was impressed with the amount of time the author put into it, as well as all she did to support the birth families as she told their stories and watched them crumble through the reveal of insurmountable loss. While losing their parental rights was painful, they trusted their children would be in better care.

The book is heavily researched, but includes something beyond just the facts. It oozes with compassion. Roxanna Asgarian clearly cared about the subject matter and wants us to better understand the heart of it. This did not feel like a book written for profit. It felt like a deeply felt and desperate plea for change.

I am immensely grateful to Macmillan Audio and NetGalley for my copy. All opinions are my own.

I accessed a digital review copy of this book from the publisher.
The book felt like two books that were forced together, one about the foster system and the other about the Hart family. While there is some explanation needed for what happened with the Harts, the author goes overboard on the information. I think they would have been better suited to focus on the Harts and the related families and have the background information about the foster system in another book.

We Were Once a Family by Roxanna Asgarian is a heartbreaking yet beautifully written story about the corruption and racial biases that prevail in the American foster care system.

Following the story of six adopted children, Asgaian thoroughly investigates their birth families, their lives, their adoption stories, and the tragedy of their deaths - without relying on sensationalism. She uncovers the ways in which race, class, and wealth affect peoples' interactions with systems and government services. Going one step further, she follows the living sibling to highlight the generational trauma of foster care.

I've never had something so compassionately written infuriate me so much. Would definitely recommend!

This book is my first 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟of 2023, and finishing it left me a bit speechless.

It’s difficult to know what to say when all elements to this story are devastating. A broken foster/child welfare system led to the murder of 6 Black children. That system still persists today, and there are numerous tragic stories we haven’t heard.

This book should be required reading for everyone, but especially for those unaware of/unfamiliar with the reform that must take place to actually protect vulnerable children and their best interests - instead of making decisions on their behalf that take them away from their biological families. What if we offered support to families and parents that are struggling instead of punishing them?

“We Were Once a Family” is incredibly well-written and well-reported. Asgarian has done a phenomenal job digging into this story from the perspective of the biological families whose children were killed, and whose lives were irrevocably changed before, during and after the welfare system failed them. The narration is also very strong, voiced with care and understanding for the difficulty of the material.

This is not an easy read, but it’s an tremendously important one.

Big thanks to Macmillan Audio and NetGalley for the advanced listen.

This was a very well written and researched book. It was a heart-wrenching look into the foster care/adoption system. The story was interesting and had me rushing back to it to get in a few more chapters.

We Were Once a Family, A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America by Roxanna Asgarian and
Narrated by Suehyla El-Attar was a 5 ⭐️.
This was great! Difficult but great. I didn’t know about this crime and I’m glad I’m some ways that I didn’t. The author does an excellent job presenting all of the facts. I thought the narrator was perfect and highly recommend listening to it. Nothing is cut and dry about life and I realized after finishing that I need to hug my loved ones more. I can’t do this justice but I think you should read this. It’s life changing.
Thanks McMillan audio via NetGalley.

We Were Once a Family by Roxanna is a heart breaking story. The story starts with two women who adopted six kids, two sets of siblings. Ended their lives and the children's lives by driving off a cliff in California. Roxanna does an excellent job investigating the back stories and the events that took place before this sad ending happened.
She talks with each set of siblings birth parents and families. She even goes to each of the two women's families. So we can get an idea of why on earth this tragedy came to this level.
Roxanna goes into the foster care system and points out how the system is broken. She points out some very interesting facts and statistics.
This definitely was a very sad book to listen too. However, hopefully the author is able to bring awareness to we have a broken system and the ones that are bearing the brunt of the broken system are the innocent children. No matter what side of the isle you fall on, I hope we can all agree we need to do better for the children. I don't believe there is a one solution fixes the problem. This problem will not be fixed over night, because it has been broken for far too long. However, we need to do better.
I gave this book 5 stars because I believe the author did a great job with trying to get all sides of the story.
This book was published on March 14th 2023. Thank you to Macmillian Audio for gifting me a copy to listen too.

We Were Once a Family is a heartbreaking and infuriating book that I could not stop listening to. Roxanna Asgarian did an amazing amount of research and clearly explains the genesis of the foster care system and the problems that lie within and get ignored or made worse by politicians and agencies meant to help. Listening to every step along the way where the system broke down or was played by corrupt officials to the detriment of the children and their families and allowing Jennifer and Sarah Hart to prey on children with little to no actual oversight left me feeling sick to my stomach. The murders of the children that they were supposed to be caring for may have been the end of the story for the Hart family, but Asgarian provides the full back story on the birth families for the six kids and how they lost their children as well as how they're faring today. I can't even begin to fathom how any of them feel, most especially Dontay who was left behind in horrible conditions at a foster treatment facility while his brothers and sister were sent off to be adopted and ended up being considered the "lucky" one to survive his own terrible treatment there. I can't say enough about the narrator, Suehyla El-Attar, either. Her voice kept the story moving and drew you in immediately. This book will stay with me for a very long time. Thank you to Macmillan Audio and NetGalley for the early listen in exchange for my honest opinion.

We Were Once a Family is a stunning debut book about the Hart family, who made headlines across the country in 2018 when their SUV was driven off a cliff killing the two moms and six adopted children inside. Journalist Roxanna Asgardian reveals the foundation of this disturbing, tragic story and how the criminalization of poverty made it all possible.

We Were Once a Family is so much more than a true crime book. Roxanna Asgarian provides a very in depth look at the stories behind the headlines. And when I say in depth, I mean back to the children’s birth parents’ childhoods and intergenerational trauma. Instead of focusing on Jennifer and Sarah Hart’s actions and their evil deeds, Asgarian focuses on the victims. She makes it clear from the first pages that where news stories failed to acknowledge the children’s birth families and the impact of child removal, they are the focus of this book. In doing so, Asgarian sheds light on the children’s journey to the Harts, shares the stories of their birth families, and indicts the child welfare system that failed them.

We Were Once a Family is an immersive narrative founded in journalism and expanded into a rigorous policy analysis and call for change. Within its pages, Asgarian offers essential context of the child welfare system in Texas as well as the families’ struggles and circumstances, including the biased family court system. She explores the the laws and policies that made each failure of these children possible along with systemic racism that enabled it.

Told intimately, Asgarian makes it clear from the beginning that she is not a passive observer in this story. She became involved with the story and the lives affected by it. However, Asgarian notes throughout the narrative where she was involved and how she impacted the story. I appreciate the full transparency she offers as well as her writing, which invites readers to fully step into the story.

I cannot offer enough praise for the way Asgarian narrates this story, full of the complex family relationships and personal decisions, with empathy as well as social and cultural awareness. Contrary to popular narratives about families involved with state-surveilled care, she does not automatically blame the birth mothers and families for the removal of their children. After reading her fiercely empathetic portrayal, I was surprised to learn in the epilogue that Asgarian is a white woman. I think that speaks to the profound compassion and understanding with which she approached the people and subject matter.

There were so many times I felt gut wrenched and anger while reading We Were Once a Family. It is an inherently emotional journey compounded by exceptional storytelling. But Asgarian does not simply leave this story with readers to digest and forget about. Instead, she compels us to listen and act.

We Were Once a Family will undoubtedly be one of my favorite books of the year. It is a phenomenal and impactful piece of nonfiction that left a searing impression. I strongly encourage you to read it, whether you known nothing about the child welfare system or are intimately involved with it. I especially urge anyone that holds preconceived notions and/or assumptions about birth and adoptive families to pick this book up. We Were Once a Family is a book I will be relentlessly recommending to everyone.

This was such a tough book, I knew the final story of the Hart children but my goodness did the system fail all these kids in so many ways, every step of their too short lives.

This book made me even angrier for the poor bio parents that lost their kids first to the system then to a horrible crime. As the one bio mom said just knowing they were out there and hoping one day when they were grown they would come find her, that was the hope that she lived with and now that hope is gone.

That Sarah and Jennifer’s family thought those kids should be buried with their parents as a “family” no no no those were their murderers not their “parents”. These women should have never been parents in the first place it was all fake, they should have looked into the reported abuses, the returning of certain children to get new ones. There were so many red flags but the foster care system is so broken and cases like this bring to glaring focus.

I was also disgusted in the fact that the bio parents of all these kids had to find out on the news or from reporters that their children were gone, that is unacceptable.

Suehyla El-Attar’s narration was really well done she brought the correct reverence to the reading.

This was a hard story but an important one and one that I would hope will start a conversation (at the very least) about how broken the foster care system is.

I think this happens more often than anybody even realizes. Would this story have even made national news without the infamous picture of Davonte hugging the cop at a BLM protest.

Heartbreaking story but glad someone told the story of these poor kids.

This would be a good book club book I think the discussion would be really interesting!

4 stars

I received this audiobook from the publisher Macmillan Audio and NetGalley for a fair and honest review

Thanks to NetGalley and MacMillan Audio for the opportunity to listen to this advanced copy. All opinions are my own.
I was very interested in this book coming from a background of working for almost a decade in children’s protective services. I understand that there are bad workers and bad foster parents just as there are really amazing ones and that situations like this do happen. I was interested to hear what led to this event and learn if it was a negligence thing on the part of CPS workers or a mental break of the adoptive parents or what exactly happened. I was expecting a true crime type book involving a protective service case/adoptive family. What I wasn’t expecting was a complete rant about the failures of the entire child protective service field with skewed statistics to prove those points. I know for most people they would read/listen and take this as unbiased fact with the way it is presented and for the general public that hasn’t worked in that field that may lead to enjoying this book more than I did.

A truly heartbreaking but important piece of journalism, this book dives deep into the tragedies of both the Hart family murders and the American foster care system. Though the stories Asgarian tells are harrowing and infuriating, I couldn't stop listening, and ended up finishing the audiobook in two sittings. I will say that the narrator's delivery is a bit awkward, at times placing emphasis on the wrong words, and in one instance reading a letter written by a Black man in a very cringey way that almost seems like she's making fun of his dialect, though I'm sure that was not the intention. It would have been much better to hire a Black narrator to read the letter. However, on the whole I thought the book itself made up for the issues I had with the narration, and I am glad to have listened to it.

This was fascinating and heartbreaking. I learned a lot about the foster care and adoption systems in the United States.

This book has so much potential. I really wish the author had left politics, anti-Trump and the anti-cop propaganda out of it. Minus those things this book is a good read.

Many thanks to NetGalley, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and Macmillan Audio for gifting me both a digital and audio ARC of this important book by Roxanna Asgarian and beautifully narrated by Suehyla El-Attar - 5 stars!

In 2018, the headlines screamed the story of two women who apparently intentionally drove their SUV off a cliff into the Pacific Ocean. It turns out that they were a married couple who adopted six black children from two different families in TX and extolled their perfect family all over social media. But in truth, the couple moved around a lot to avoid issues and the children were living horrible lives of abuse and neglect. The author, a journalist, was the first to look into the children's birth families and found a huge backstory of repeated failures by the systems put in place to protect these children and their families.

This book is meticulously researched. The author took the time to find the children's birth families and really get involved with trying to help them after this tragedy. While hindsight is always 20/20 and we could site just as many tragedies from children being returned to their birth families as not, this book highlights the fact that being poor and black doesn't help in the eyes of those in charge. There were people desperate to have these children back in their homes and they weren't deemed acceptable. This book should be mandatory reading by all those in charge of making child placement decisions for another side to the story. Highly recommended.

This is so well written with an excellent narrator. I loved the author’s writing style and was absolutely heartbroken for the people it is written about. It’s hard to imagine that children have to go through life in these situations. Very eye opening.

We Were Once A Family is an eye-opening book that documents the lives of the six children killed at the hands of two women in Oregon in 2018. It is a fast read, with lots of background information about the foster care system in the US and its many faults, shortcomings, and sometimes deep corruption. It is a searing indictment of the system and how it penalizes the poor.

It focuses on families whose children are taken away instead of the adoptive families we hear most about. I expected to feel heartbroken from this book, but did not anticipate how angry I would feel. The children of too many families are taken away and the government fails to adequately help families. I listened to the audiobook, which was perfectly narrated by Suehyla El-Attar.

Thank you, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Macmillan Audio for providing this ebook and audiobook ARC.

This was a heartbreaking read, but such an important and essential book. I appreciated the author looking at the Hart family as indicative of the bigger problems with the foster care system. It made me enraged for and sympathetic to the children in the system. Very well-written.

I requested this one because it might be an upcoming title I would like to review on my Youtube Channel. However, after reading the first several chapters I have determined that this book does not suit my tastes. So I decided to DNF this one.