Hope's Boy

October 29, 2007
In this memoir of a decade spent in foster care, Bridge illuminates the horrors of a system that, in its clumsy attempts to save children, he argues, all too frequently condemns them to physical and emotional abuse. The child of a teenage mother who divorced her abusive husband soon after Bridge was born, he watched helplessly as his mother disintegrated under the impact of isolation and poverty. At the age of seven, Bridge was dragged away from his mother, literally, by police and warehoused in an enormous California juvenile facility patrolled by armed guards. The state eventually transferred him to a foster family dominated by an obese, bullying Estonian woman who had survived imprisonment in Dachau as a child. At 17, as he prepared to leave foster care for college and freedom, Bridge finally had a reunion with the mother he never stopped missing. In his narration of this unending nightmare, Bridge shows particular skill in portraying his isolation and the defenses he constructed to survive it. He also has a talent for grotesques, particularly that of the monstrous foster mother who revisited the misery of her upbringing on her foster children. Bridge’s obsessive focus on his loneliness and his two “mothers” is so intense that a more balanced picture of his life fails to emerge and his attachment to another foster child remains unexplained. Yet Bridge, a Harvard Law School graduate who has devoted his career to children’s rights, has provided remarkable insights into a dark corner of American society.

March 31, 2008
Bridge's memoir of surviving his childhood in a broken child-care system where the state acts as parents for the young certainly illustrates the complexity of such government institutions. After being removed from his mother by the state, Bridge spent a brief stint in a residential program before being put into foster care. His decade-long stay with an emotionally abusive and unsupportive family left its share of marks, and the book feels like Bridge's attempt to cleanse the taint of the experience. While it does highlight problems of the system, it fails to be anything more than just another story of an unfortunate upbringing. As the story is told through the eyes of a young boy, David Drummond's soft elocution ably puts readers back into that frame. But this doesn't keep Drummond from juggling the range of ages, genders, accents and personalities of the different characters effectively. Although the story isn't extraordinary, Drummond remains consistent and engaging throughout. Simultaneous release with the Hyperion hardcover (Reviews, Oct. 29, 2007).