{"product_id":"9780544103443","title":"To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\"A triumph of narrative reporting and storytelling. . . .  Beam gives [foster children] a much-needed voice and does what too many adults in the foster-care system can't, or won't: She advocates for them.\" —New York Times Book Review\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003eWho are the children of foster care? What, as a country, do we owe them? Cris Beam, a foster mother herself, spent five years immersed in the world of foster care, looking into these questions and tracing firsthand stories. The result is \u003ci\u003eTo the End of June\u003c\/i\u003e, an unforgettable portrait that takes us deep inside the lives of foster children at the critical points in their search for a stable, loving family.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe book mirrors the life cycle of a foster child and so begins with the removal of babies and kids from birth families. There’s a teenage birth mother in Texas who signs away her parental rights on a napkin only to later reconsider, crushing the hopes of her baby’s adoptive parents. Beam then paints an unprecedented portrait of the intricacies of growing up in the system—the back-and-forth with agencies, the shuffling between pre-adoptive homes and group homes, the emotionally charged tug of prospective adoptive parents and the fundamental pull of birth parents. And then what happens as these system-reared kids become adults? Beam closely follows a group of teenagers in New York who are grappling with what aging out will mean for them and meets a woman who has parented eleven kids from the system, almost all over the age of eighteen, and all still in desperate need of a sense of home and belonging.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFocusing intensely on a few foster families who are deeply invested in the system’s success, \u003ci\u003eTo the End of June\u003c\/i\u003e is essential for humanizing and challenging a broken system, while at the same time it is a tribute to resiliency and offers hope for real change.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Houghton Mifflin Harcourt","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47009318076656,"sku":"9780544103443","price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780544103443_p0.jpg?v=1763711231","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780544103443","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}