50books_poc | The Women Who Raised Me by Victoria Rowell -- my 5/50

I grabbed this memoir by Victoria Rowell, The Women Who Raised Me, because she discusses her childhood growing up in foster care. The subject interests me because my father was a foster child. Though not a person of color like Victoria Rowell, he shared many of the same experiences that she describes in the book.

She is a skilled storyteller with a fascnating story to tell, the book is most interesting in the first two thirds when she describes her childhood. Victoria is the child of an unknown black man and a white woman who in the words of her daughter, "loved music, dancing and strong black military men," but who also suffered from debiliating schizophrenia, and was thus unable to care for the children she loved. Victoria was placed in foster care at birth. She was blessed with good care givers and great talent which gained her mentors, and opportunities beyond those experienced by most foster children. A gifted ballet dancer her talent was nurtured by her foster mother to the point that she was granted a scholarship first to the Cambridge School of Ballet, and later the American Ballet Theater school. She was cruelly rejected by her mother's family who hated that she wasn't white, but she came to understand that her troubled mother loved her.

Rowell covers a lot of interesting ground: the pain of having a mentally ill parent, the world of ballet, life in foster care and the experience of being biracial. The background on the life of a ballet dancer was worth the purchase of the book alone.

This won an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work: Debut Author and was an Essence magazine Bestseller.