Safe, the debut offering by Mark Daley, is a well written and very readable exploration of Mark and his husband Jason's experience with the foster care system and their desire to both foster children and ultimately adopt and create a family.

Backed up with information and statistics, he shares the highs, lows and heartbreaks of a broken system. As a country, we fail our least protected citizens. I applaud this well written debut and I hope that Mark continues to write further books.

Thank you to the Atria Books and Netgalley for an ARC of Safe in exchange for an honest review.

4.5 stars

I had heard Mark talk on NPR about this book.
I knew I had to read it.

I loved this book. SO much emotion was swirling around. The writing is naked, raw, and heartfelt.
I felt that I was in misery with Mark and Jason while waiting. Waiting for the foster placement, getting Logan and Ethan, waiting for the courts to decide the fate of the children and their own lives.

The waiting on the social workers, the childrens parents, the lawyers, the grandma. Everything was on a holding pattern.

I could feel the love that Jason and Mark had for each other and the children.

This is not a ringing endorsement of the foster care system, however, it shows the many ways in which we as a society fail children who need help.

Mark peeled back the layers of the system and how broken it is.
Yet, I wasn't left despondent, I was actually left with hope.
HOpe that there is change coming, Hope that there are still people like Mark and Jason out there to take care of children, hope that parents might change.

Hope that the right individuals to children can change their lives forever.

Daley’s memoir reflects on his journey as a foster parent in a child welfare system that does not seem to value the welfare of children. His well-written story is a roller coaster ride of emotions. I laughed, I cried, and my anxiety woke me up in the middle of the night and I had to continue reading to the end. The writing is honest and raw, and I rooted for Daley’s family from the first page.

Throughout his story, Daley deftly weaves in facts and research about the problematic issues in the foster care system. As a child advocate, I was familiar with the story from the point of view of the family who lost the child. “Safe” opened my eyes to how the system works from the foster family perspective. It reminded me of Sarah Sentilles’ book, “Stranger Care.”

My thanks to NetGalley for an Advanced Readers Copy of this book. All opinions are my own and not biased in any way.

An accurate and unflinching representation of the foster care system through the eyes of a foster parent, slightly hampered by the effort to forcefeed facts and the narrator's focus inward
I'm a CASA, Court Appointed Special Advocate for youth in foster care, so I'm very well aware of the many ways the system is dangerously broken. I spend countless hours contacting the various people who are meant to be watching out for the kids, writing reports for the judge, meeting with the kids, chasing down services, attending meetings, sitting in court, and I'm awake at night wondering when I'll get word about how the last parental visit went, what about the latest drug screen, did the State forget to pick the kid up again, why can't I find a summer camp that fits, is anyone going to respond to my email this decade, etc.
Daley presents a lot of examples of the most infuriating parts of dealing with the system, and all of them are things that happen every day. The hope is that people will be woken up by these examples, and advocate for change, volunteer their time, step up in some way to help the hundreds of thousands of kids who need it. My fear is that because the book is 90% examples of how dealing with the system can crush you, and only 10% "but we got lucky later, so it's not all soul-destroying!", that it may instead serve as a way of discouraging people from fostering or getting involved.
For the most part, Daley does well at presenting the statistics that back up the need, but occasionally they're shoehorned in, in a jarring way. He's anxious, so he opens the laptop for some doomscroll-style research, and here's a page of facts about the terrible history of Native children stolen from their families. He closes the laptop and goes to bed. The facts are true, and need to be more widely known, but the presentation is so abrupt that it puts the reader on their back foot.
In some ways the book gets a little repetitive, especially as Daley connects the tragic experiences of his own family members with those of the people he's interacting with. I sincerely hope that the numerous typos have been fixed by publication, it felt kind of awful that his beloved late cousin's first name should be the most egregious example, it swapped from Jaime to Jamie all over the book, often within the same paragraph.
Even with all my experience, I didn't learn until fairly recently how many people turn to fostering as a way to adopt. Before becoming a CASA I assumed that people who foster do it because they want to foster, that if the child needs them to, they will sometimes adopt, but that they go into it entirely for the purpose of being a bridge of safety and security, focusing on the child, hoping the child can safely and successfully go home. Foster care social media has shown me that there are a surprising number of foster parents who really want the bio parents to fail, and fast. The language is always about the things they want out of their imagined future relationship post-adoption, picturing themselves standing beside the graduating senior, walking the bride down the aisle, etc. It's very much "I want a kid, I want to do these things with a kid, I want the kid to view me in this way" and I find it very uncomfortable, especially having been a CASA dealing with failed adoption and return to the system. Daley spends most of the book talking about children in this way, prioritizing what he wants out of fatherhood over what his children would receive from his parenting. He's very frank about the ways the two of them planned to game the system in order to get what they wanted instead of being stuck with a temporary child. It's not until the very end that he comes close to acknowledging where his focus was, when he recognizes that his anxiety over the possibility of losing the boys kept him from being fully present when he was with them.
Overall, definitely a book worth reading, and one I would hope would motivate people to attend a recruitment presentation in their area for fostering, providing respite care, or becoming a CASA, or to get involved in fixing/rebuilding the system.
Digital galley provided by NetGalley did not impact my review.

SAFE by Mark Daley is subtitled "A Memoir of Fatherhood, Foster Care, and the Risks We Take for Family." I had asked for this preview because I have had students who feel passionately about the foster care system and any related research. It truly is eye-opening to learn more about the traumas involved and to recognize the support that these children need. Mark Daley, the author, is a communications professional with experience in the political sphere and has now turned his attention to activism as a founder of TheFosterParent.com. His book was a bit surprising because it is so personal, very emotional and moving. After four months of marriage, Daley and his husband decided to foster children, with the hopes of eventually adopting. The first few chapters of his book deal with their relationship, marriage, and decision to try fostering. Then, the focus turns to the realities of childcare, especially for infants, and much learning that being a new parent entails. Subsequent sections look at visitation rights, the birth family situation, custody battles, and adoption protocols. In this memoir, Daley employs a conversational tone to share the story that he and Jason experienced, but he also incorporates relevant statistics (e.g., in California about 55 percent of foster children are eventually reunified with their birth parents). Told with emotion and primarily from an adult perspective, SAFE is a heartfelt introduction to the foster care system in California and points to its inadequacies as well as to the importance of a support network for all involved. To the End of June, published roughly a decade ago, is another excellent text on this subject. More recent titles include the coming-of-age memoir Troubled by Rob Henderson and Anne Moody's analysis which also covers international adoptions titled The Children Money Can Buy. There are also multiple books written for young children to help prompt discussion and hugs. I hope SAFE gets the wide readership it deserves.

What a powerful read! If you have any interest in child services in this country, this will be a good one to check out. I liked how he included lots of information about our child support services while weaving his story about being involved as a foster parent. It was frustrating and maddening, though. Definitely more importance needs to be put into our child adoption and foster care systems!

After taking training to be a CASA and attending court custody hearings, I went into this book with a negative impression of the foster care system. Mark Daley confirmed my opinions. He combines his personal story of fostering to adopt with many statistics regarding foster care in the US for children from infants to age 18. His writing is excellent and his story heartbreaking. This book should be required reading for anyone who has or works with children. It is outstanding. I thank the publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this ARC.

This is an incredibly impressive debut - well-written, perfectly paced, and full of humor and heart. I don't have personal experience with the foster system but I have heard about many of the difficulties associated with fostering a child, such as dealing with past traumas and the possibility of reunification with the birth family. This memoir articulately depicts the path that the author and his husband takes in order to bring children into their loving family. Mark stole my heart from the very first page, and I so hoped that things turned out for the best for his amazing family.

Within the storytelling, Mark also delves deeply into many of the problematic statistics surrounding children in foster care. He addresses the innumerable problems that are associated with child welfare, including the overworked employees, the socioeconomic and racial biases, and the lack of standardization for what determines a fit parent. He expresses his mixed feelings of reunification with the birth family evocatively - a consistent worry that every foster parent looking to adopt must endure.

This compelling memoir was perfectly balanced between sharing their personal story and providing the reader with context about the pervasive issues plaguing the foster system. I was so invested in their story and it also taught gave me tremendous insight into the challenges faced by the different people involved in the foster care system.

This memoir takes us through the process of what it might be like to adopt a child or children via the foster-to-adopt system, where families agree to foster a child with the hope of someday being able to adopt them. However, the goal of the system is to have the child reunified with their family -- so you can imagine all the complicated feelings involved. The author tells of his own personal experience foster adopting, and the result is a story that is just about impossible to put down. He also very effectively advocates for more funding and attention on the foster care system.

Excellent book. Heartbreaking ordeal that this family had to go through.
Thanks to author, publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book. While I got the book for free it had no bearing on the rating I gave it.

Mark is an amazing storyteller and I was quickly sucked in to his world as he and husband began the foster to adopt process. It's something I went through with my husband and I enjoy reading books about the topic. This one was written so well and there was so much emotion that came off the page and into my heart. Well done. Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC. Five stars.