We Were Once a Family

Really brutal and upsetting portrayal of the child welfare system. I honestly can't rate this - I don't want to - because some of the content was too distressing: what happened to those six kids is such an enormous failure of society. This is an investigative journalist's look into the 2018 Hart murder-suicide, with a special emphasis on the adopted childrens' biological families and histories.

I was actually reminded of the Kim Philby biography - about a British good ol' boy who turned out to be a Cold War double agent, working for the Russians for 30+ years. That book - and this book - stressed how “looking the part”, whether that be two “normal seeming” white women in South Dakota or a normal-seeming Eton/Cambridge guy, can hide real monstrosities. Except these two women did something so appalling to read: a lesbian couple who rush-adopted six Black children and then trapped them in a nightmare of abuse, all while posting self-serving social media “performance parenting”, before murdering them in a suicide-murder. It's just so terribly sad, and the author makes it a point to centralize the systemic failures which led to this - it is, indeed, nuts that a couple could adopt so quickly, with so little oversight, and with so many red flags accumulating. It just makes you want to scream.

Anyway. I spent much of the book asking myself why I was reading this. It felt voyeuristic and was so upsetting. If you have an interest in the foster care system, it's definitely of interest - but just be careful about the contents. Lots of interesting points about transracial adoption.