A Place Called Home

June 27, 2022
In this captivating debut, Ambroz, a national poverty and child welfare advocate, recounts his harrowing experience with homelessness and as a child in the foster care system. Raised in the 1990s in New York City by a schizophrenic, abusive mother, Ambroz and his siblings learned self-reliance early on as they bounced between homeless shelters and dangerous nights spent living on the streets. Eventually, Ambroz’s mother’s physical abuse became so extreme that he reported her and was subsequently thrown into foster care. But as Ambroz reveals in unflinching flashbacks, the system proved to be no sanctuary, rotating him through a series of group homes over the next few years that ranged from neglectful to abusive, before he finally met and moved in with a stable, loving family. At age 17, with the help of his attorney and social worker, Ambroz was able to emancipate himself a year early from the foster care system, after which he attended Vassar college and finally came out as a gay man. While the narration occasionally lags, Ambroz’s triumph over adversity will stir readers’ sympathies, as will his clear-eyed critique of the nation’s broken foster care system: “When it comes to ailments of the poor... poverty programs treat the symptoms, never the system that produced them.” Galvanizing and compassionate, this personal account of survival should be required reading.

August 1, 2022
Ambroz, former foster child and current child-welfare advocate, chronicles his time growing up homeless in New York, being moved from foster situation to foster situation, and understanding his sexuality. Initially raised by a mother struggling with mental illness and a lack of treatment, Ambroz and his siblings are at the mercy of a system that does not place them first. Upon entering Vassar College, Ambroz finds his purpose in advocacy efforts for children. A Place Called Home presents an unflinching, frank examination of the realities of being a child without a home and being surrounded by a fundamentally flawed system where neither child nor parent have enough help, or the right help, to break the cycle of poverty. Ambroz's story is a frightening example of how easily inadequate procedures and policies traumatize lives each and every day. The heart of this first memoir is both a raw account of Ambroz's journey to adulthood and a powerful, uncompromising call to action for significant change.

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Starred review from July 15, 2022
Moving testimony from a survivor of trauma. In his riveting debut memoir, lawyer and child welfare advocate Ambroz recounts an early life of poverty, cruelty, and degradation. With his mother suffering from severe mental illness, he and his two older siblings moved from New York City to Albany to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, living on the streets, in shelters, and occasionally in crumbling apartments from which, inevitably, they were evicted. Caught in a cycle of "homelessness, hunger, housing, welfare, and homelessness again," Ambroz tried to mitigate his mother's volatility by insulating her from triggers that would set her off. Not least, keeping her stable meant protecting himself and his siblings from countless "inexplicable moment[s] of brutal, casual cruelty." Besides exposing the "illness, infection, infestation, and unmet needs" that marked his childhood, Ambroz indicts a system of severely inadequate social services. "The system doesn't trust people in poverty," he writes, and his desperate pleas for help were ignored: "Over and over again the three of us were left with a woman who was clearly hurting us by people in positions of authority." When they were removed from their mother, the path to foster placement was fraught with obstacles. Ambroz was considered a special problem: Though he feared outing himself as gay, therapists--and one macho foster father--tried to "fix" him. After temporary housing in a juvenile detention facility and group homes, he was sent to a family that abused and exploited him. One of 450,000 children in foster care, Ambroz managed--with the help of sympathetic supporters and his own fierce determination--to escape the system that threatened to relegate him to the same "slide from poverty to disaster" that dogged his youth. Beginning in high school, as a member of the National Foster Youth Advisory Council, he has worked for meaningful reform, and with this potent memoir, he urges readers to "become one of the changemakers." The author is now the head of Community Engagement (West) for Amazon. A haunting, inspiring chronicle of fortitude and perseverance.

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