This book made me late yesterday. (Really, I would have been on time otherwise.) Each time I sat down to read just a little, I became so totally engrossed in Ms. Rhodes-Courter's story that I could not put the book down. When Ashley Rhodes-Courter was 3 years old, she was removed from her mother's custody and became a ward of Florida's foster care system. Thus began a 9 year long nightmare, over the course of which she had 19 different foster parents, some okay, some marginal, and one in particular, frighteningly bad. When she was finally adopted by a loving couple at the age of 12, it took many years for Ashley to trust that these parents were really there for her, and she finally began the long journey toward healing.While the book was clumsily written at times (she wrote it as a very young adult) Ashley Rhodes-Courter impressed me with her resilience, her clear-eyed observations, and her amazingly positive outlook even after everything that she went through. This is a scathing commentary on Florida's foster care system. At a couple of different points she poses the question of why the state was willing to pay millions of dollars for a failed system where people ran foster homes like puppy mills and caseworkers looked the other way, but was utterly unwilling to spend even a penny to help teenaged mothers like Ashley's so they could provide a home for their own children. She also wondered why -- even when the evidence was in plain sight -- the caseworkers and therapists always assumed that the children were lying about their mistreatment, to get attention. (They even ignored multiple phone calls to the child abuse hotline from Ashley's teachers!)
Ashley eventually brought a suit against the state of Florida. In reviewing her files, she figured out that out of 195 people who had had some responsibility for her case over those 9 years, the two who had really advocated for her and gotten her out of the system -- a Guardian ad Litem and a lawyer -- were volunteers.
I admit that I wept while I read this book. It made me consider the carelessness with which some people treat their lives and the lives of others. Ashley's mother was not a bad person, but was herself a product of careless parenting -- as was the abusive foster mother. I found Ashley's story to be very important and moving. Highly recommended.
