Foster Care Odyssey - Theresa Cameron

 Sub-title: A black girl's story

While travelling this summer, I picked this up at a campground book exchange.  Serendipitously, this story of a woman raised from birth in the foster care system is the story of an adoptee whose mother left her with Catholic charities and who never knew her father.  The author survived this system, barely, and went on to get her doctorate from Harvard.  

I learned a lot about how the foster care system operates and the impact on children.  Inadvertently, I think, the author's writing revealed the guarded, stilted communication style that came from an unstable, unpredictable childhood.

I wanted to see if she ever found her father so I researched her. Therese Cameron wrote a second book about her struggles in her adult life Learning to Live: A Black Woman's Journey Beyond Foster Care.

But, I also found that she was fired from Arizona State University for alleged plagiarism of a syllabus, and sued and lost a discrimination case that she brought as the root cause of her firing.  After losing the case in 2011, she died in 2012 and I've yet to find any genealogical records of her death.  

I ordered her 2nd book ...review to come.

Published: 2002  Read: June 2022  Genre: Memoir

The Nun - Denis Diderot

Where do I find this books?  Maybe I should start including pictures of the covers because in most cases that's contributes to my decision to pick them up from the used bookstores.

This is a very old book about a joke that was played on a soft-hearted gentleman.  His friends pretended to be a young woman forced into a convent who pleads with the gentleman to help her break her vows and leave the convent.  She tells her story of being a child of her mother's lover passed off as a daughter of her husband, but shunted to the cloistered life to prevent her from making claims on her family's estate.

It still has relevance for today because it illuminates the way women were treated as property to be bought or disposed of as desired.  It shows the strength of character required to stand up for oneself and stay true to your convictions.  A different read.

Published: 1972 (originally written 1760)  Read: September 2016  Genre: Fiction, Classics

Altar Music - Christine Lore Weber

This is the story of several women's lives shaped by their faith and its conventions.  There is a mother who disregards the warnings of her priest and pays the consequence in her marriage.  Her daughter lives in the shadow of her disappointment and her granddaughter takes their resignation with their circumstances as a calling to be a nun.  I found the characters difficult to follow and their limited choices within their Catholic faith frightening.  It was a moving story of the individual's struggle to have a life within the boundaries of their society and the impact of their sacrifices on themselves and those around them.

Published: 2000  Read: August 2016  Genre: Fiction