Stranger Care

A Memoir of Loving What Isn't Ours

By: Sarah Sentilles

Narrated by: Sarah Sentilles

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 newborn—about 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 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?

Beautiful story of love

For those of us who foster, this is such a raw and beautiful reflection of what we go through, the love, the loss.
Sarah, I would love to connect with you, I’m writing as well and would love your thoughts. Twitter @mujazul

Behind the scene look at foster care system Personal and Heatbreaking

Brilliantly written saga of adoption process through the foster care world. Moving look at mother’s love for her child and the struggle to move from foster parent to permanent legal parent. Many aspects of spiritual and emotional moments expertly described.

Heartbreaking and beautiful

This was so gripping and moving — could not stop listening. Such a story of love.

A Realistic Story of Love and Foster Care

This is a story that sheds a realistic look at the foster care system. It’s heartbreaking at the core but ultimately a story of love and what being a parent looks like in different forms.

Slow speaking narrator

The narrator spoke so slowly that it was almost impossible not to feel like the words were being pulled out. I set the speed higher and thoroughly enjoyed the rest of the book. It’s a heartfelt story, and after working ten years in child welfare investigations, the author is very accurate—she doesn’t fluff anything or sugarcoat topics for herself or the Department of Social Services.