Home Boys

How does it feel to be a child abandoned by one’s own family? Home Boys tells the unforgettable stories of children and parents caught in this traumatic situation and of the group home’s child-care staff who tries to help them. Branching out from a Staten Island home as the main setting, the book’s sweep is broad, spanning all of New York City and its five Family Courts. Stories of success and failure, of love and hate emerge. There are acts of domestic terrorism and hate crime—a pipe-bomb scare evacuating a residential block, an attempted murder of a boy by another boy, a burning cross sent up the elevator of the Catholic Charities building by way of protest. Fearful of the power the system has given him, the narrator admits, “I felt I was asked to play God with children’s lives.” The narrator’s marriage falls apart in the course of his family’s residence in the home. More urgent than the narrator’s are the life stories of the children, subject to the care of strangers in a system that counts heads for monetary purposes. The lives of six boys emerge in detail. Despite it all, plenty of raucous teen talk and ribald humor throughout the book attests to a comic spirit. The staff of the group home and some of the boys create a home and a semblance of a loving family. That achievement is the heart of the book.