To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care is a 2013 book investigating the American foster care system by American author Cris Beam. Beam, known for her deep and lucid reporting on the plights of marginalized populations, including transgender kids and other sexual minorities, turns to what she believes is a huge and failing system that often deprives children of their right to secure nurturing environments. Though she makes her position known in the book, she spends more time describing the broken system and its root causes, constructing a rigorous analysis grounded in data and narratives of the children, parents, social workers, and other figures involved. The book has been celebrated for its quality of reporting and analysis, accomplished without resorting to stereotypes or caricatures. To the End of June is composed of many vignettes about different parent-child relationships that have crumbled, some of them due in no small part to the foster care system whose purpose is ostensibly to repair them. Beam describes tragic scenarios in which foster children start to believe in the promises of the system only to realize that it cannot erase the simple fact that they have lost their biological parents. About half a million children, Beam reports, are in the foster care system at any given time in the United States. Their care represents an annual $20 billion in federal and state expenditures. This sum of money does not include the millions upon millions of dollars that families put into the care and well-being of the children. Beam demonstrates that foster children are often traumatized by this bloated system. Atop the scars that they bear from being separated from their families, foster kids are often uprooted repeatedly to be placed into the care of family after family on short-term agreements. As a result, they are at greater risk of abuse and psychiatric disorders, risks that follow them even once they age out of the system. Beam colors these statistics with narrative case studies. One teenage girl, born in a poor, mixed-race family in New York City that could not take care of her, moved in with a white, middle-class family who had barely the dimmest understanding of her predicament. After imposing a strict rule set that alienated the girl, she ran away and went missing. A Chinese-American girl, Lei, survived the foster care system and made it into a top college. However, her academic success did not satisfy her longing to know the stories of her biological parents. Other stories are warmer, such as that of a young boy named Noble. Born to parents who abused crack cocaine and neglected him, he was taken in by a gay couple who created a safe, nurturing, and enriching environment for him to grow up in. Still, Beam shows that too many of the stories about the foster care experience involve deplorable behavior. Rather than blame any single figure or process in foster care, she suggests that the pain and suffering is a systemic problem that transcends the system itself. However, she points out places where the system needs urgent attention, offering hope that some of the problems facing foster kids can be ameliorated.

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Cris Beam

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To the End of June

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