DISCOVERIES

Hope’s Boy

A Memoir

Andrew Bridge

Hyperion: 320 pp., $22.95

IT took great courage to write this memoir. Andrew Bridge was 7 when the police took him from his mother, Hope, on a street in North Hollywood. Hope was 17 when she married Andrew’s father. They were convicted of bank fraud. When they got out of prison, Hope got a divorce and went to Los Angeles. Andrew was 5 and living with his grandmother in Chicago when she sent for him -- full of love but unprepared for motherhood. For two years, she moved him from place to place, unable to pay the rent. He saw things no child should ever see. Hope tried to kill herself by cutting her wrists and wrote his name in blood on the bathroom mirror. An ex-boyfriend broke into their apartment and held a knife to Hope’s throat while Andrew ran for help. Despite it all, he never doubted his mother’s love. The police took him to MacLaren Hall, an L.A. County institute for abused children and a “death house of childhoods.” He was assigned to an abusive foster family and allowed to see his mother for an hour a month, until she was sent to a psychiatric facility. Ten years passed. Against all odds, he applied to and was accepted at Wesleyan. From there he went on to Harvard Law School and is now an advocate for children in foster care.

“Hope’s Boy” opens with Bridge’s trip to the Eufaula Adolescent Center in Alabama, in preparation for a lawsuit he eventually won against it. He visits a 14-year-old named Jeff in solitary confinement who sleeps on a mattress on the floor with a thin blanket. “Over a half million American children live in foster care,” Bridge writes. Most never graduate from high school, let alone college. “Perhaps their lives might have been better had the system that fed and clothed them . . . also let them know that . . . their real families had not only failed but loved them too.”

Our discomfort with love and failure has helped create and fuel a foster-care bureaucracy that often operates with a breathtaking lack of humanity. Bridge survived to write this beautiful, moving memoir. So many children don’t.

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A Chant to Soothe

Wild Elephants

A Memoir

Jaed Coffin

Da Capo: 206 pp., $16 paper

JAED COFFIN’s mother left Thailand in 1970 to marry an American soldier. The couple moved to Maine and had two children. Jaed’s father left them before the boy’s second birthday. In Maine, the only Asians Jaed saw “worked behind the counters at Chinese restaurants.” Classmates called him “Chinese freak.” In high school, “obsessed” with Buddhism, he left for his mother’s village in Thailand to become a monk. He was ordained, but to his surprise got little or no instruction about what to do next. He tried writing “a novel about a young man who attains enlightenment by returning to his ancestral homeland to become a monk,” eventually realizing he “didn’t understand the true motivations of my protagonist.” He went into the forest to meditate with the forest monks. “Sometimes you have to walk and not know what is next,” he told a fellow monk when they got lost. “You can find the Buddha that way.” “The Buddha is in the heart,” an elderly monk told him -- in the heart that is mae nai jae, the “not sure heart.” After a few months, he returned to the U.S. He went to college, traveled around the world, came home and decided to write.

There’s no brilliant enlightenment, no flash; Jaed’s is a simple story. It is the phrase “not sure heart” that reverberates and guides him in his first decisions as an adult. Well worth the journey.

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susan.reynolds@latimes.com