LIFE FOR ME AIN'T BEEN NO CRYSTAL STAIR

LIFE FOR ME AIN'T BEEN NO CRYSTAL STAIR

From School Library Journal YA-This Pulitzer Prize winning author has written a poignant and moving tale of foster care in America. Sheehan tells the story of Florence, an African American; her oldest child, Crystal; and Crystal's son, nine-year-old Daquan. Although interviews with Crystal's younger siblings and social workers are incorporated, this narrative is told mainly from Crystal's point of view. At age 14, she gave premature birth to her son. Because she was a minor and her mother was a drug addict, she and her baby were placed in two different foster homes by the state of New York. The author demonstrates how the many moves from one home to another, from one social worker to another, and from one institution to another affected this young woman and her child, and vividly shows the impact of institutional neglect and abuse on dysfunctional families. However, Crystal is a realist and a fighter and successfully takes on the battles of her mother, siblings, and son to improve their lives. This is a compelling tale written in a spare, nonjudgmental style. It's easy to read and informative.Pat Royal, Crossland High School, Camp Springs, MDCopyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. On October 7, 1984, in the seventh month of her pregnancy, Crystal Taylor gave birth to a son. Because Crystal's mother didn't have her own apartment, Crystal had been living temporarily with the baby's father and his parents. But what concerned the hospital case worker was Crystal herself. According to law, fourteen-year-old Crystal was too young to be discharged from the hospital on her own. Both mother and baby would have to be placed in foster care.There are nearly half a million foster children in the United States. The emotional consequences of foster care - of being moved from one home to another, from foster family to institution and back - on any child are unpredictable. Life For Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair charts a terrifying legacy of institutional abuse and neglect, shows the damage that has been inflicted on three generations of one inner-city family, and paints a haunting portrait of children growing up without childhood.Susan Sheehan has written an astonishing and harrowing account of the consequences of a mother's homelessness and drug addiction on her child and grandchild. From Publishers Weekly Reprinted from the New Yorker , this searching and graceful book limns a black family's entrenchment in the New York City foster-care system, a system which, says Sheehan, costs taxpayers billions of dollars a year. In 1984, 14-year-old Crystal Taylor and her newborn, Daquan Jr., were placed in foster care because Crystal's mother, Florence, was an itinerant drug addict. Sheehan (author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Is There No Place on Earth for Me? ) tracks Crystal and Daquan Jr.'s odyssey through foster care and details Crystal's family history. A drug and alcohol abuser since grade school, Crystal witnessed her father's near-death from heroin, was sodomized by an uncle at the age of four, was sexually abused by others and was regularly beaten by Florence, herself an abused child and a product of the foster-care system who eventually placed five other children in foster care as well. Daquan Jr. was fostered by a black middle-class family while Crystal chose to live in a group home where she readily made friends but where she flunked her school courses, was arrested for possession of drugs and for shoplifting, and dated drug dealers, two of whom were murdered. In 1992, Crystal, a mail clerk at an advertising agency, finally accepted responsibility for her son and brought him to live with her in the Brooklyn apartment that she rents. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Pulitzer Prize winner Sheehan, author of Is There No Place on Earth for Me? ( LJ 5/15/82), depicts three generations of a New York inner - city family raised in foster care. We mee