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.
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