We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America

Author:   Roxanna Asgarian
Publisher:   Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN:  

9780374602291


Pages:   320
Publication Date:   14 March 2023
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   Not yet available   Availability explained
This item is yet to be released. You can pre-order this item and we will dispatch it to you upon its release.

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We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America


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Overview

"Winner of the 2023 National Book Critics Circle for Nonfiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize A Washington Post best nonfiction book of 2023 Winner of the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction ""A riveting indictment of the child welfare system . . . [A] bracing gut punch of a book."" --Robert Kolker, The Washington Post ""[A] moving and superbly reported book."" --Jessica Winter, The New Yorker ""A harrowing account . . . [and] a powerful critique of [the] foster care system . . . We Were Once a Family is a wrenching book."" --Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice One of Publishers Weekly's best nonfiction books of 2023 The shocking, deeply reported story of a murder-suicide that claimed the lives of six children--and a searing indictment of the American foster care system. On March 26, 2018, rescue workers discovered a crumpled SUV and the bodies of two women and multiple children at the bottom of a cliff along the Pacific Coast Highway. Investigators soon concluded that the crash was a murder-suicide, but there was more to the story: Jennifer and Sarah Hart, it turned out, were a white married couple who had adopted six Black children from two different Texas families in 2006 and 2008. Behind the family's loving facade was an alleged pattern of abuse and neglect that had been ignored as the couple withdrew the children from school and moved west. It soon became apparent that the State of Texas knew all too little about the two individuals to whom it had given custody of six children. Immersive journalism of the highest order, Roxanna Asgarian's We Were Once a Family is a revelation of precarious lives; it is also a shattering expos� of the foster care and adoption systems that produced this tragedy. As a journalist in Houston, Asgarian sought out the children's birth families and put them at the center of the story. We follow the lives of the Harts' adopted children and their birth parents, and the machinations of the state agency that sent the children far away. Asgarian's reporting uncovers persistent racial biases and corruption as young people of color are separated from birth parents without proper cause. The result is a riveting narrative and a deeply reported indictment of a system that continues to fail America's most vulnerable children while upending the lives of their families."

Full Product Details

Author:   Roxanna Asgarian
Publisher:   Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Imprint:   Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Dimensions:   Width: 14.70cm , Height: 2.80cm , Length: 21.40cm
Weight:   0.413kg
ISBN:  

9780374602291


ISBN 10:   0374602298
Pages:   320
Publication Date:   14 March 2023
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Not yet available   Availability explained
This item is yet to be released. You can pre-order this item and we will dispatch it to you upon its release.

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Reviews

Roxanna Asgarian is one of our most important reporters working today, covering crime, the courts, and child welfare with boundless empathy, rigorous journalism, and unforgettable prose. We Were Once A Family shines a necessary light on all of the systemic forces that made a seemingly unthinkable family tragedy all too preventable -- and thus, all the more infuriating. This book astonished me, in part because it shows why American society continues to let children down, over and over again. --Sarah Weinman, author of The Real Lolita and Scoundrel After Jennifer and Sarah Hart plunged themselves and their six children over a cliff in California, something strange happened: the media focused almost entirely on these white mothers, leaving the stories of the Black children they adopted--and later murdered--untold. Through meticulous and empathetic investigative reporting that stretches from California to Texas and many places in between, Roxanna Asgarian has not just rectified that injustice --she has provided a systemic critique of the predatory, racist child welfare system that is every bit as urgent and undeniable as the movements for police abolition in 2020. --Ethan Brown, New York Times bestselling author of Murder in the Bayou: Who Killed The Women Known as the Jeff Davis 8?


Author Information

Roxanna Asgarian is a Texas-based independent journalist who writes about child welfare and the law. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, New York, and Texas Monthly, among other publications. She received the 2022 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award for We Were Once a Family.

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