Like Family

In the tradition of Jo Ann Beard's "Boys of My Youth" and Mary Karr's "The Liar's Club," Paula McLain has written a powerful and haunting memoir about the years she and her two sisters spent as foster children. In the early '70s, after being abandoned by both parents, the girls were made wards of the Fresno County, California, court and spent the next 14 years in a series of adoptive homes. The dislocations, confusions, and odd pleasures of an unrooted life form the basis of one of the freshest memoirs to be published in recent years.

McLain's beautiful writing and limber voice capture the intense loneliness, sadness, and determination of a young girl both on her own and responsible, with her siblings, for staying together as a family.