Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Memoirs

STRANGER CARE

Sarah Sentilles

A Memoir of Loving What Isn't Ours

A powerful story of what the author learned from fostering a newborn--about injustice, about making mistakes, about how to better love and protect people beyond our immediate kin.

After their decision not to have a biological child, the author and her husband, Eric, decided to adopt via the foster care system. Knowing that the goal is reunification with the birth family, Sarah opens their home to a flurry of social workers who question, evaluate, and ultimately prepare them to welcome a child into their family--even if it most likely means eventually giving them up. After years of starts and stops, a phone call finally comes: a three-day old baby girl, in immediate need of a foster family. Sarah and Eric bring this newborn stranger home and are struck with the depth of both the expected and the unexpected.

STRANGER CARE brings to light a subject that is universal and timely. It is a book about how we can learn to be better to one another. It's about how we can learn from injustices like income inequality, addiction, racism, nationalism, and even our very own mistakes to better love and protect people beyond our immediate kin--and our planet, more broadly.

Sentilles is the author of DRAW YOUR WEAPONS, BREAKING UP WITH GOD, A CHURCH OF HER OWN, and TAUGHT BY AMERICA. A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Divinity School, she lives in Idaho's Wood River Valley. DRAW YOUR WEAPONS won the 2018 Pen America Award for Creative Nonfiction and received enthusiastic blurbs from comp authors like John Jeremiah Sullivan, Ruth Ozeki, Nick Flynn, Emily Rapp, and more.

Available products
Book Published 2021-07-20 by Random House

Comments

Sarah Sentilles has done it again: placing herself in the most difficult of positions for the sake of the most vulnerable, in service to individuals and to the world. Stranger Care is a book about loving a child without boundaries, without bloodlines, without limits. This is the only book about parenting that I would recommend to anyone, because it strikes at the essential, complicated, and heartbreaking core of what parents do every moment of every day: love, love, love, love. No matter what.

Stranger Care is a gripping and beautiful memoir about marriage, family, bureaucracy, community, heartbreak and hope. With wisdom and honesty, Sarah Sentilles shares a personal story that is also a story about how we live in America today - and why we must find new ways to love and care for one another.

Sentilles beautifully and profoundly expands our understanding of what it is to mother, to tend, to love. Her prose has a clear eyed quality that is truly breathtaking... I doubt I will read a more profound and powerful book for a long while. This is the kind of book that alters you, makes you kinder, opens your heart up. Read more...

Author's essay in the New York Times: 'How's Our Girl?': On Loving a Foster Child and Letting Go ... Read more...

Be warned: your heart will be altered by Stranger Care. Sarah Sentilles has written a book that the whole damn world needs to read - a book on caring, on radical empathy, on how to hold rage and grief and pure love simultaneously within the body. In language that strikes and soars and sings, Sentilles honours the child at the centre of Stranger Care. In doing so, she shows us all how we might better look after each other.

UK/C: Text Publishing

Stranger Care is a beautiful, harrowing, and profound memoir about what it means to love and to mother, to belong and let go. In prose so riveting I found myself holding my breath as I read, Sarah Sentilles writes about fostering - and attempting to adopt - a baby through the foster care system. With profound sensitivity and insight, Sentilles takes readers with her on her tender and wrenching path to motherhood, while grappling with the complexities, contradictions, and injustices of a system meant to protect the most vulnerable. I love this book so much it hurts. It's a powerful, heartbreaking, necessary masterpiece.

Sarah Sentilles has written a deeply remarkable memoir so breathtaking and heartbreaking and smart and hopeful and important, and you might not even notice because you'll be too busy feverishly turning pages. I less read STRANGER CARE than inhaled it, in the first place because I genuinely could not put it down but mostly because it felt like this story entered my bloodstream and changed me. This is a memoir for anyone who has ever loved a child or a whale or a bird or a tree or indeed any part of this hard, beautiful world we all share, which is to say everyone. This is a memoir for everyone.

In Stranger Care, Sarah Sentilles offers us a book that calls us to redefine what it means to have and make a family, to expand our understanding of what and who belongs, and to care more and better for those around us - for our friends, for our children, even and especially for strangers. It's a work of radical moral philosophy as much as a memoir of one family's journey through the foster care system. Their story has changed me - it broke my heart wide open in the best possible way - and I don't think I'll ever be same.

Sarah Sentilles' Stranger Care is an illuminating and heart wrenching look at the foster care system in America, which includes half a million children and disproportionately impacts parents and kids of color. Sarah's personal experience as a foster parent, combined with her reportorial examination of a deeply flawed system, makes Stranger Care a transformative revelation.