Stranger Care: A Memoir of Loving What Isn't Ours

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS CHOICE A powerful, heartbreaking, necessary masterpiece.Cheryl Strayed, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Wild The moving story of what one woman learned from fostering a newbornabout injustice, about making mistakes, about how to better love and protect people beyond our immediate kin May you always feel at home. 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 systems goal is the childs 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 liveseven 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 Sarahs discovery of what it means to motherin this case, not just a vulnerable infant but the birth mother who loves her, too. Ultimately, Cocos 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 were all relatedtree, bird, star, personhow might we better live?