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Stranger Care
- A Memoir of Loving What Isn't Ours
- Narrated by: Sarah Sentilles
- Length: 9 hrs and 14 mins
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Publisher's Summary
New York Times Editors' Choice
"A powerful, heartbreaking, necessary masterpiece.” (Cheryl Strayed, number-one New York Times best-selling author of Wild)
The moving story of what one woman learned from fostering a newborn - about injustice, about making mistakes, about how to better love and protect people beyond our immediate kin.
May you always feel at home.
After their decision not to have a biological child, Sarah Sentilles and her husband, Eric, decide to adopt via the foster care system. Despite knowing that the system’s goal is the child’s reunification with the birth family, Sarah opens their home to a flurry of social workers who question them, evaluate them, and ultimately prepare them to welcome a child into their lives - even if it means most likely having to give the child back. After years of starts and stops, and endless navigation of the complexities and injustices of the foster care system, a phone call finally comes: a three-day-old baby girl named Coco, in immediate need of a foster family. Sarah and Eric bring this newborn stranger home.
“You were never ours”, Sarah tells Coco, “yet we belong to each other.”
A love letter to Coco and to the countless children like her, Stranger Care chronicles Sarah’s discovery of what it means to mother - in this case, not just a vulnerable infant but the birth mother who loves her, too. Ultimately, Coco’s story reminds us that we depend on family, and that family can take different forms. With prose that Nick Flynn has called “fearless, stirring, rhythmic”, Sentilles lays bare an intimate, powerful story with universal concerns: How can we care for and protect one another? How do we ensure a more hopeful future for life on this planet? And if we're all related - tree, bird, star, person - how might we better live?
What the critics say
"In prose so gripping it reads like a thriller, Sentilles describes the choices that led to the moment when she and her husband are on the phone with a social worker, saying yes to fostering a three-day-old girl.... What makes this book so powerful is that by experiencing motherhood through the lens of fostering, Sentilles is able to look at the wrenching and worn-out topics of parenting in a new way.” (San Francisco Chronicle)
“A heartbreaking memoir that, if you let it, will change the way you understand love and loyalty and family and caretaking and belonging.” (Chicago Tribune)
“An astonishing account of motherhood experienced through the complex lens of foster parenting.” (Shelf Awareness)