Nonfiction Book Reviews

Hope’s Boy by Andrew Bridge was an autobiography that I really wanted to love.  The story is nothing short of a miracle: Andrew was a child raised by a mentally unstable mother (Hope) who locked him in a closet and fed him cat food, yet showered him with love.  She truly loved him, even though she couldn’t take of him physically.  The state eventually took him out of her care, and he ended up in the foster care system in California.

He spent a month in the MacLaren Hall, the Los Angeles County’s facility for foster children, and then was placed with a family who he ended up spending the rest of his childhood with.  On emancipation at age 18, he was still with that same family, which is unheard of as a regular foster child, but the family never made any move to adopt him, and he never wanted them to.  The family never treated him as one of their own, and the mother handled him very roughly at some points, although as he got older, that seemed to stop (or he at least stopped talking about it).

He eventually ends up going to college, graduates from Harvard Law School and becomes a lawyer - not a “normal” route for a foster care child, where roughly only 3% of foster care children even go to college.

As a survival mechanism, Andrew Bridge was a very withdrawn, shy child who didn’t interact with others very much, and never developed a loving bond with any of his classmates, his foster family, or really anyone at all.  His mother was in a mental institution for years, and he had virtually no contact with her for the 11 years that he was in foster care.  His grandmother tried to contact him, but because of extreme poverty, wasn’t able to very often.

Although that barrier between him and the rest of the world was one of the reasons that he survived and did as well as he did (because he never depended on others to do anything for him - he had to be independent) it also made the book into a difficult read, at least for me.  I never felt as if I truly related to him and what was going on with him - I felt as if there was a wall between me and him, and I never felt personally connected to the story.  I almost didn’t finish the book; it was a struggle to get it done.

The other problem for me was the style of writing.  I have never really liked poetry, and his style of writing would rightly be described as “poetic.”  Here’s a very brief excerpt as an example:

“As always, she had made the twin bed that morning, and now in the evening shadow, the tucked bedcover rested smooth as ink.  I flopped down, my legs hanging at the side, my ears and nose still cold from the trek across the street.  Tired, my mind emptied slowly into the raven night of the room’s deepening corners.” Page 28, “Hope’s Boy”

If that appealed to you, then you’ll love this book, because the entire book is filled with phrases like that.  To me, it was just a bit over the top.  That’s a personal preference, and I hesitate to even mention it, except it was something that bothered me throughout the book.

Overall, it was just too depressing (there never is a feel good moment in the whole book) and I never felt as if I truly got to know him, so despite my want to love it, I ended up simply liking it okay.  I’m surprised it was a New York Times Bestseller - I wouldn’t have pegged it to do that well, myself.  Did I completely miss the boat here?  Anyone else read it and want to tell me what they thought?  Leave your comments below - I want to hear from you!

3.75 out of 5 stars

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