To the End of June

The Intimate Life of American Foster Care

By: Cris Beam

Narrated by: Susan Ericksen

Who are the children of foster care? What, as a country, do we owe them? Cris Beam, a foster mother herself, spent five years immersed in the world of foster care looking into these questions and tracing firsthand stories.

The result is To the End of June, an unforgettable portrait that takes us deep inside the lives of foster children in their search for a stable, loving family. Beam shows us the intricacies of growing up in the system - the back-and-forth with agencies, the rootless shuffling between homes, the emotionally charged tug between foster and birth parents, the terrifying push out of foster care and into adulthood.

Humanizing and challenging a broken system, To the End of June offers a tribute to resiliency and hope for real change.

©2013 Cris Beam (P)2018 Tantor

Critic reviews

"A very moving, powerful look at a system charged with caring for nearly half a million children across the US." (Booklist, Starred Review)

Educational and intriguing

Inspires you to want to get involved. Incredible listening to the author following up on each kid.

Well worth the time

I commend the author for her dedication to telling this story and providing the level of background information and detail it contains. I want to come back and listen to this one again. I really enjoyed and valued the way the actual viewpoints of many foster children themselves were included and at the center of the work throughout the narrative. Great listen for anyone involved in the system.

Very informative!

I didn’t know much about the foster care system and this book is a great starting point! It gives a lot of insight into the system, it’s history, theories behind it and follow a few foster families and kids through their foster journey. It was very informative and I really enjoyed it!

Insightful and unbiased.

The book is very well done and inclusive of all sides within the system. The reader does a good job as well.

Explains the system in interesting, personal way

A must-read for anyone involved in Child Welfare or foster care, or working with disadvantaged youth. Interesting and informative throughout.

Fantastic read

Easy to digest, fact packed, it really makes you think. I've already recommended it to multiple people I know.

Good dissertation

I was looking for a story, and I got one, but it was not as I expected. I thought this was a book that would be a story told in a storytelling manner about the intimate lives of children in the foster care system, There was some of that, but it was more like a research paper or a dissertation. The book was about problems with the foster care system itself. A lot of analysis and in depth research went into this, so I want to acknowledge that. The author did an immense amount detailed research, and I am impressed by that. It was just hard to finish. The foster care system is very broken.