To the End of June, Cris Beam
To the End of June, Cris Beam
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

To the End of June
The Intimate Life of American Foster Care

Author: Cris Beam

Narrator: Susan Ericksen

Unabridged: 12 hr 15 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 02/20/2018


Synopsis

Who 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 To the End of June, an unforgettable portrait that takes us deep inside the lives of foster children in their search for a stable, loving family.

Beam shows us the intricacies of growing up in the system—the back-and-forth with agencies, the rootless shuffling between homes, the emotionally charged tug between foster and birth parents, the terrifying push out of foster care and into adulthood. Humanizing and challenging a broken system, To the End of June offers a tribute to resiliency and hope for real change.

About Cris Beam

Cris Beam is the author of several award-winning books, including To The End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care and Transparent: Love, Family and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers. Her journalism has been featured in several national magazines and on public radio. Beam teaches creative writing at Columbia, NYU, and Bayview Women's Correctional Facility and lives in New York City.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Shawn on September 07, 2013

Fairly well written book about a heartbreaking subject -- abused, abandoned and anonymous children stuck in the country's foster care system. I read some criticism of the author's clear "political bias". Set aside the fact that the author is, herself, a child of abandonment and a member of the LGBTQ......more

Goodreads review by Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship on October 25, 2015

This is a compelling, though sobering, look at foster care and how it affects kids and families. This book is best read to get a sense of the major issues in foster care, and for the personal stories of the people the author follows, and less so for specific information about how the system works. Fo......more

Goodreads review by Danielle on September 12, 2016

This was a sobering book, but definitely worth reading. The author says she primarily wrote this book to be descriptive rather than proscriptive and that's accurate. It's mostly just descriptions of interviews and experiences with foster children and foster parents (and some social workers) in the N......more

Goodreads review by Jeanne on February 24, 2018

I read nonfiction regularly, but I am more likely to "gulp" mysteries and fantasies than nonfiction. I gobbled Cris Beam's To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care. She compellingly and insightfully combined case studies, statistics, and theory about foster care, especially about......more

Goodreads review by Maggie on September 16, 2015

Before I read this book, I imagined all kinds of good things about what being a foster parent or foster kid might mean. That was quite naive, it turns out. It does work out well sometimes, but now I think that most often, it doesn't. This book brought home to me just how messed up the system is and......more