Foster Care Odyssey
A Black Girl's Story
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- $3.99
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- $3.99
Publisher Description
The year is 1954. Abandoned by her teenage mother, a baby girl is left in the care of a charity in Buffalo, New York.
The baby is black in a city and at a time in which blacks and whites have little to do with one another; the charity is an overwhelmingly white organization. Little Theresa Cameron is placed into this racially divided world.
In this shattering account of her eighteen years as a “ward of the state,” Cameron takes us inside the life of a foster child. She shares with us her heartbreaking struggle to survive in a foster-care system where children’s welfare often seemed the lowest priority.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Left as an infant with Catholic Charities in 1950s Buffalo, N.Y., Theresa Cameron was doomed to spend her childhood in foster homes because her mother never signed the final adoption papers. "Very little has been written to convey what children experience and how they feel living among strangers," notes Cameron, now a Harvard-trained urban planner and designer, in her introduction to Foster Care Odyssey: A Black Girl's Story and even less about that of black children. Her ability to clearheadedly evaluate the morass of negative feelings without lapsing into sentimentality is one of the most affecting aspects of this memoir, which covers 19 years in foster care.