Today I want to lift up the everyday heroism of foster parents and foster-adoptive parents.

What better way to do so than in the words of one of them. Best-selling, award-winning author Rene Denfeld described the experience of becoming a foster-adoptive mother of three in her illuminating New York Times Modern Love essay — “Four Castaways Make a Family.”

I had the pleasure of meeting Rene last week at Diesel Bookstore, where she read from her new novel, The Butterfly Girl, a sequel to The Child Finder. The novels feature a private detective whose own traumatic history draws her to find lost children. (It is an Indie Next Pick for October, Amazon Best Book of the Month, and has received effusive praise from Margaret Atwood and Cheryl Strayed.)

Rene’s lyrical, compelling depictions of characters who, like her, survived trauma-filled childhoods to make lives of beauty and value make her even more of a hero. The New York Times agreed, including her in a list of everday heroes in 2017.

Thank you to all of the foster parents and foster-adoptive parents who day-by-day, through patience and love, are saving the world one life at a time.

Warmly,

Laura

#everydayhereoes #kindness #kindnessmatters #saveonelifesavetheworld