Guest review by Janelle Bailey, retired Literature teacher.

As soon as I began reading I felt this, “Gosh, I’ve read this story before” feeling and immediately connected to two different books I’d read at two very different, distant from each other times, in my life but with similar subjects: poverty and foster care, here combined. I thought of Jeanette Walls’s The Glass Castle in terms of poverty and Steve Pendleton’s A Chance in the World in terms of foster care…and here they were, both authors, blurbing this book on the back when I flipped it over.

Different from the two of them, however: no immediate assurance from the start that it all, somehow, turns out okay. Walls’s and Pendleton’s books each begin with an end that provides reassurance that it all, ultimately and somehow, after I complete my reading of the 300-ish pages, turns out with them each in an okay place. This book does not provide that same reassurance from Ambrosz. I find myself continually flipping to the inside back cover to his author photograph, which presents that reassurance in a slight smile, suggesting that he, too, comes out of it all–this, which I read with challenge and pain, much of it–okay, or at least better than he is while enduring it all.

And while in some ways David Ambrosz’s story is similar to theirs, albeit with a combination main course of poverty and terrible foster care, and added sides of single parent with mental illness and being gay in an anti-LGBTQ+ (not even the acronym, yet, then) world, his challenges are individually special and his own, even though he endures what others similarly have.

Ambrosz is a storyteller who takes us along on his difficult journey and allows us to endure the difficulties and pain with him but also to feel the hope he shares for a better future for himself and others AND the gains he makes in small and large ways to find himself and become a confident and stable and strong self, ultimately.

I’ll need to do further research into the legislation for which he’s worked and pushed, to see what’s come of it all. But I am happy to have met him here and know so much more about him and his story. This is an enlightening and eye-opening–valuable–read.