Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction
We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America
We Were Once a Family is a work of nonfiction that follows the Hart family tragedy of 2018 while examining the distortions in the American child welfare system. Through testimony and reporting, it shows how separation, poverty, race, and institutional failure shaped the lives of the families involved.
Work Information
By following one tragedy closely, the book gradually reveals the structural distortions that divide families.
Roxanna Asgarian uses the 2018 Hart family tragedy as an entry point into how families are separated under the banner of child protection. Centering the voices of the birth families, the book calmly exposes what the system failed to save.
Review Summaries
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Readers praise the depth of the reporting and the author's close attention to the people affected. Many note that its force comes from combining urgent system critique with careful attention to personal grief.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Farrar Straus & Giroux
- Published
- 2023-03-14
- Pages
- 297 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 14.61 x 2.67 x 21.72 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780374602291
- ISBN-10
- 0374602298
- Price
- 5575 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Nonfiction/Law
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 exposé 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.
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 .
Reviews
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Social work
A good read. Being the in field of social work give insight and makes one think
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interesting and sad read
Really interesting well researched book about how the foster care and adoption system caused two sibling groups with loving but unstable parents to end up adopted, far from home, and murdered by their adoptive parents.
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incredible. heartbreaking and profound
I can’t say enough about this. I learned so much, much I wish I didn’t know, but now am forced to reckon with. This is a side of the foster care and child welfare system I had never even considered and now that I have some background on it, I want it to change. Roxanna reports on this and treats these families with empathy, respect and humanity, and it’s an example of how to be. This weaves together a lesson in a complex system and the story of families broken in pieces.
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Dry
This book might be important reading for anyone working in social services in any capacity. But it was overall, a depressing slog.
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Changes in our judicial System is needed
What a great book. This book reinforces the need for change that is needed in our Judicial system in regard to foster care/ adoption and any other out of home placement. Roxanna Asgarian does an amazing job in her research and writing on the questionable parenting techniques of Jennifer & Sarah and how our legal system failed them, the children and the biological family!