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This book is one parent’s testimony of how the foster care and adoption systems routinely continue to fail a girl in need as well as the family who loves her. The author’s family already consists of loving parents and a combination of biological, adopted, and kinship-care children. When friends who were fostering a young girl recommend her as a good fit for the Jones family, they happily welcome her into the fold. At first, Mercy seems to adjust and blend into the family well, but over time she starts to exhibit disturbing behaviors that her new family is at a loss to understand and treat.
The foster care system withholds information about children’s pasts to protect them, but in Mercy’s case, the lack of information leaves her family without any way to understand her traumatic history or her reaction to it. Her mental health quickly deteriorates over the course of her tweens and early teens, and her foster mother must piece together bits of Mercy’s past to understand what happened to her. The family receives little help from the foster care system or the healthcare system throughout Mercy’s disorienting, expensive, and horrifying journey between mental health institutions.
The author wrote this eye-opening book to warn potential adoptive and foster parents and inform them about the kinds of questions they should ask throughout the process. The story is a clear indictment of how institutions deal with minors’ mental health issues. However, the tale of this family’s struggle to support their troubled youngest member also has many heartwarming moments of kindness and togetherness. The story of Mercy and her family is full of trauma and tragedy but is also one of perseverance and unconditional love.