Hope's Boy: A Memoir

When Andrew Bridge was seven years old, he and his mother—a mentally unstable woman who loved her child more than she could care for him—slid deeper and deeper into poverty, until they were reduced to scavenging for food in trash bins. Welfare officials did little more than threaten to take Andrew away, until a social worker arrived with a police escort and did just that while his mother screamed on the sidewalk. And so began Andrew's descent into the foster care system—"care" being a terrible irony, as he received almost none for the next eleven years.

Academic achievement was Andrew's ticket out of hell—a scholarship to Wesleyan University led to Harvard Law School and a Fulbright Scholarship. Now an accomplished adult, he has dedicated his life to working on behalf of the frightened children still lost in the system. Hope's Boy is his story, a story of endurance and the power of love and, most of all, of hope.