“Many people assume that women who lose their children to foster care are not only challenged in meeting the demands of motherhood, but are also bad people: incompetent, selfish, and morally defective. Reading Rise is a tutorial in empathy, because what rises from these pages is love, often love that has endured despite appalling struggle.

“In ‘Bonded for Life,’ Robbyne Wiley’s description of how she learned her son’s point of view through reverse role-playing, seems especially wise. Often, even attentive parents don’t understand their children’s point of view. But out of fearful hardship can come some kind of emotional coherence, a readiness to accept the complicated nature of love.

“This mother learned to look clear-eyed at her child’s strengths and shortcomings and to accept them through a recognition of her own strengths (which her experience with the system had called into question) and shortcomings (which once were too frightening to identify because they seemed irreparable). What comes off this page are the essentially courageous nature of reunion and the joy that intimacy can confer.”

— Andrew Solomon, author of Far From the Tree and Noonday Demon