Stranger Care: A Memoir of Loving What Isn't Ours by Sarah Sentilles is an astonishing account of motherhood experienced through the complex lens of foster parenting. Sentilles gracefully articulates the spiritual and emotional preparation she and her husband, Eric, undertook for their role as foster parents, and shares with raw honesty the challenges of dealing with the overburdened and underfunded bureaucracy of the Department of Human Services (DHS).
At the heart of Stranger Care is sweet Coco, a calm, happy baby who inspires in her foster parents a deep joy and devotion. She thrives in their care. Visits with her birth mother, Evelyn (a pseudonym), result in Coco regressing and falling ill, yet her fate is dependent on DHS metrics that favor the unstable, untruthful Evelyn without regard to Coco's best interests. Sentilles (Breaking Up with God) is careful not to paint Evelyn in broad brushstrokes that diminish her humanity, yet is critical of DHS protocols that often result in children returning to unsafe conditions with volatile biological parents.
A writer and scholar of religion, Sentilles is a co-founder of Alliance of Idaho, an organization dedicated to protecting the basic human rights of immigrants. Each chapter of Stranger Care celebrates the interdependence of our fragile world while chronicling Sentilles's heartrending foster care journey. As she points out, our shared humanity lies in our willingness to care for society's most vulnerable. And so it is with fostering a child for whom love, stability and compassion are among the greatest gifts a foster parent can offer. --Shahina Piyarali, writer and freelance reviewer