Safe

November 1, 2023
Public policy consultant Daley blends his own foster-care-to-adoption story with an informative overview of the current state of the U.S. foster care system. The result is a riveting memoir that shows readers the rewards and challenges that accompany the journey to build a family via foster adoption, with a focus on the highs and lows of navigating a complex bureaucracy that is meant to protect children and families but often lets them down. It is a notably balanced, compassionate look at the families who must give up their children to foster care, the children themselves, the workers who struggle with heavy caseloads, and the families who enter into foster care arrangements, knowing that reunification with the biological family is the system's ideal outcome. It's a complicated, often heartbreaking situation, which Daley skillfully brings to life with personal details while successfully advocating for improved communication, funding, and overall outcomes for foster children and families. Give this to readers who enjoy memoirs that shed light on social issues, such as Stephanie Land's Maid (2019).

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November 27, 2023
Daley, a former communications director for Hillary Clinton, debuts with a heartbreaking memoir about foster parenting. Daley and his husband, Jason, got married in 2015 and were eager to have children. After considering surrogacy, they changed course when a friend shared her experiences growing up in foster care, spurring the couple to look into becoming foster parents. Soon after getting approval from Los Angeles County, Daley and Jason welcomed brothers Ethan (13 months old) and Logan (three months) into their home. Despite inconsistent visits from the boys’ birth parents, who struggled with substance use and neglected the brothers in the early months of their lives, an appeals court ruled that Ethan and Logan had to be returned to their biological family after just a year and a half with Daley and Jason. The bulk of the narrative details the couple’s unsuccessful efforts to regain custody of the boys; eventually, they adopted three siblings in 2020. (“Does this story have a happy ending?” Daley writes in the conclusion. “Yes and no.”) Across the memoir’s middle stretch, Daley lets his frustrations with the foster system fly, yet he manages to do so without compromising his strikingly compassionate tone. The result is a gripping and earnest examination of the meaning of family. Agent: Lara Love Hardin, True Literary.

December 15, 2023
An adoption becomes a nightmare for a California couple. "As a gay man...I never had a pregnancy scare force me to ponder important questions like: Am I ready to be a parent?" So writes Daley early on, noting that he and his husband, Jason, shared the desire to become parents to one or more of the roughly 120,000 children awaiting adoption at any given moment. Many find foster homes due to an appallingly common scenario whereby a biological parent neglects or abuses a child, often as a result of addiction. As part of a new wave of same-sex parents involved in the adoption of children, Daley and Jason have found themselves to be pioneers of a sort. "We wouldn't be the first men to raise children without a mom," writes the author, "but the gravity of what that might mean for a child had never crossed my mind." As it turns out, the adoptees had fewer qualms, and soon they were calling Daley "dad." Enter a regime in which child protection and child welfare are wobbly and easily conflated categories, where the primacy of keeping biological families together trumps potential danger to children, and where competent social workers leave in droves, burned out, while bureaucratic drones set the rules. In a complex series of negotiations and legal back and forth, Daley and Jason lost their would-be adoptees: "I had envisioned a future in which we would always be in their lives, but Ethan and Logan were sent back to a home not yet ready for them and there was nothing more I could do to protect them." It took more endangerment to the children and more wrangling before the couple found much more than they had bargained for. A strong indictment of a failed child welfare system, but with an unexpectedly happy ending that speaks to the power of love.

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