New Book
After their decision not to have a biological child, Sarah Sentilles and her husband, Eric, decide to adopt via the foster care system. Despite knowing that the system’s goal is the child’s reunification with the birth family, Sarah opens their home to a flurry of social workers who question them, evaluate them, and ultimately prepare them to welcome a child into their lives—even if it means most likely having to give the child back. After years of starts and stops, and endless navigation of the complexities and injustices of the foster care system, a phone call finally comes: a three-day-old baby girl named Coco, in immediate need of a foster family. Sarah and Eric bring this newborn stranger home. “You were never ours,” Sarah tells Coco, “yet we belong to each other.” A love letter to Coco and to the countless children like her, Stranger Care chronicles Sarah’s discovery of what it means to mother—in this case, not just a vulnerable infant but the birth mother who loves her, too. Ultimately, Coco’s story reminds us that we depend on family, and that family can take different forms. With prose that Nick Flynn has called “fearless, stirring, rhythmic,” Sentilles lays bare an intimate, powerful story with universal concerns: How can we care for and protect one another? How do we ensure a more hopeful future for life on this planet? And if we’re all related—tree, bird, star, person—how might we better live? The moving story of what one woman learned from fostering a newborn—about injustice, about making mistakes, about how to better love and protect people beyond our immediate kin. NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE •
About the Authors:
Sarah Sentilles is the author of Breaking Up with God, A Church of Her Own, and Taught by America. A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Divinity School, she lives in Idaho’s Wood River Valley.
From sarahbecan.com – Sarah Becan is a comics artist, author, illustrator and designer, and the creator of “I Think You’re Sauceome”, a food-centric autobiographical webcomic. She was awarded a Xeric Award and a Stumptown Trophy for Outstanding Debut for her first graphic novel, The Complete Ouija Interviews, and her work has twice been nominated for the Ignatz Award. Becan illustrated the cookbook The Adventures of Fat Rice, published 2016 by Ten Speed Press, and is the illustrator of Let’s Make Ramen!, a comic book cookbook, published July 2019 by Ten Speed Press. Sarah lives in Chicago with her boyfriend Niles.
Stranger Care by Sarah Sentilles, read by Sarah Sentilles
Stranger Care by Sarah Sentilles Reviews:
“In prose so gripping it reads like a thriller, Sentilles describes the choices that led to the moment when she and her husband are on the phone with a social worker, saying yes to fostering a three-day-old girl. . . What makes this book so powerful is that by experiencing motherhood through the lens of fostering, Sentilles is able to look at the wrenching and worn-out topics of parenting in a new way.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Beautiful, harrowing, and profound . . . With sensitivity and insight, Sarah Sentilles takes readers with her on her tender and wrenching path to motherhood while grappling with the complexities, contradictions, and injustices of a system meant to protect the most vulnerable. I love this book so much it hurts.”—Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild
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