Customer Reviews

Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair: One Family's Passage Through the Child Welfare System

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This book was an account of a young woman's life from early childhood to young adulthood. Crystal Taylor and her siblings were shuffled from foster home to foster home, a pattern that was similar to that of their mother's life style. Crystal became involved in theft, drugs, and sex. She became a teenage parent at 14 years of age. Crystal and her siblings were a part of the welfare social system, as well as Crystal's baby boy. "Life for me ain't been no crystal stair" is a moving story of an individual's experience. It is an eye opener of the effects and drawbacks of poverty in a life.

I devoured this book in one night. I was shocked and saddened by the story of this young woman and her family's history with the New York Foster Care system. The thing that surprised me most about the book is the family's unwavering hope that someday they would be reunited, despite the horrible poverty and dysfunction in their lives.

The tragic tone of "Crystal's" life could not be made more clear than if one was living it as well. Psychotic and confused, Crystal is all too familiar with an unstable home life. Her mother's boyfriend impregnates her and Crystal, barely out of elementary school becomes a casualty of the system. She makes the rounds of hospitals, treatment centers and schools. At each stop she wonders what place exists for her and her child.

This author provides a calming voice of reason to Crystal's plight. To her credit, she does not villify or condemn even the harshest of people and conditions. She writes in a tone of respect and even acceptance. If nothing else, this book is a reminder of each person's duty to care about the needs of others.

I enjoyed reading this book. It was REAL. It covers the lives of three generations in the foster care system. The main character is a teenage mom who puts her baby son in foster care while she herself is a client of the foster care system. It was gritty and authentic. I felt I was living beside the characters. I really understood how it feels to grow up in the ghetto. Susan Sheehan is an excellent writer. She has pointed out some of the faults in our society.

Susan Sheehan provides a well-written account of a young girl, Crystal, who grows up with a drug-addicted mother, and through the course of her childhood is exposed to fatal drug overdoses, shame, poverty, neglect, and repeated sexual abuse and exploitation. But we have only a fleeting real impression of what kind of person Crystal actually is or becomes - although the notion of her life as a resilient one - compared to the grim alternatives - is sobering. The story ends when she is in her early 20's and the prognosis does not seem good. Sheehan is a good journalist and fine writer - the book is based on a wonderful article that appeared in the New Yorker - yet the book lacks analysis, depth, and further exploration that one might wish for. I assigned it to my graduate social work class as a case study and it was useful to stimulate discussion, but it might be good to find an autobiographical account of life's hardships for poor Black children in the United States.

This was a book assigned for a social work class and the author known to my professor. The book reads like a autobiographical novel. it follows the life of a young girl caught up in the welfare system and her side of what it is like.