Relates the author's harrowing family circumstances that led to his placement in the equally daunting foster-care system, and describes how he beat the odds through high academic achievement

This powerful and haunting memoir details the years Paula McLain and her two sisters spent as foster children after being abandoned by both parents in California in the early 1970s. As wards of the State, the sisters spent the next fourteen years moving from foster home to foster home. The dislocations, confusions, and odd pleasures of an unrooted life form the basis of one of the most compelling memoirs in recent years-a book in the tradition of...