An intriguing glimpse into a foster parent’s life that falls short of helping readers understand its young subjects.
A social worker looks back 50 years to her decision to become a foster parent to five boys.
As debut author Thompson-Guppy recounts her story of fostering children from dysfunctional families, she comes across as brave, nurturing, and naïve by turns. In 1963, the Canadian Children’s Aid Society sponsored a group home for the first time, and the author and her then-husband received minimal information on their kids’ backgrounds and no training: “it did not occur to me that I was putting my family at risk by inviting them into our home—and that naïveté may have been the reason they integrated in a successful manner,” she writes. With only a psychology degree and a short stint as a social worker at Toronto’s Unwed Mothers Department, she plunged into her new role. “Lefty,” 15, was the first to join the author, her husband, and their toddler, Trisha; he’d been abused by his father, who’d chained him to a swing set as punishment. After that came 13-year-old “Bob,” whose parents drank excessively and beat him. Later, “Val,” “Johnny,” and “Dan” joined the household. (The boys’ names are all changed.) Some boys stayed for about a year, but others left quickly; one was removed after he hit Trisha. The kids fell into predictable trouble—drug dealing, addiction, failed relationships—and the author tells of calmly helping them navigate their problems. Overall, the tone of this book is like a warm letter home, and it engagingly illuminates the life of a foster parent for troubled kids. However, it also has one primary weakness: a lack of extensive interviews with the boys themselves. For example, nearly 50 years after she took them into her home, she met Lefty, Bob, and Dan for a reunion. It’s a largely happy gathering, but Bob remains remote as he struggles to hide his addictions to alcohol and drugs. This scene would have benefited if readers could have heard more from Bob directly. Without such information, the portrayals of the boys sometimes amount to little more than lightly sketched case studies.
An intriguing glimpse into a foster parent’s life that falls short of helping readers understand its young subjects.Pub Date: July 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4759-3050-4
Page Count: 116
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A straightforward tale of kindness and paying it forward in 1980s New York.
When advertising executive Schroff answered a child’s request for spare change by inviting him for lunch, she did not expect the encounter to grow into a friendship that would endure into his adulthood. The author recounts how she and Maurice, a promising boy from a drug-addicted family, learned to trust each other. Schroff acknowledges risks—including the possibility of her actions being misconstrued and the tension of crossing socio-economic divides—but does not dwell on the complexities of homelessness or the philosophical problems of altruism. She does not question whether public recognition is beneficial, or whether it is sufficient for the recipient to realize the extent of what has been done. With the assistance of People human-interest writer Tresniowski (Tiger Virtues, 2005, etc.), Schroff adheres to a personal narrative that traces her troubled relationship with her father, her meetings with Maurice and his background, all while avoiding direct parallels, noting that their childhoods differed in severity even if they shared similar emotional voids. With feel-good dramatizations, the story seldom transcends the message that reaching out makes a difference. It is framed in simple terms, from attributing the first meeting to “two people with complicated pasts and fragile dreams” that were “somehow meant to be friends” to the conclusion that love is a driving force. Admirably, Schroff notes that she did not seek a role as a “substitute parent,” and she does not judge Maurice’s mother for her lifestyle. That both main figures experience a few setbacks yet eventually survive is never in question; the story fittingly concludes with an epilogue by Maurice. For readers seeking an uplifting reminder that small gestures matter.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4251-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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