No House to Call My Home: Love, Family, and Other Transgressions
Even as the nation celebrates the triumph of gay marriage rights, inequalities continue, particularly for LGBTQ youth, overwhelmingly minorities, who are part of the foster care system. Berg was a caseworker in a New York group home for young people in foster care ... Through their compelling stories, Berg looks at inequalities suffered by LGBTQ youth in housing, public safety, health care, prison, immigration, employment, poverty, and homelessness.
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No House excels when it provides the verbatim stories of the queer youth— unpacking the tragic and painful actualities of their lives and describing how they have become so hardened to the grimness of life ... Though he sometimes falters in his storytelling, Berg’s quest to give voice to queer youth of color is a noble one. No House seeks to make visible, the invisible and because of this is an important and revelatory read.
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No House to Call My Home is a sobering look at the lives of a variety of LGBT kids in a version of foster care. They do not live with families but in group homes. The challenges they face may seem foreign to many readers. In fact, this is a difficult book to read ... The reader feels the emotional roller coaster that Berg experienced in his short career. At times it feels like wading through molasses; the daily grind sucking life, energy, and interest out of you. Readers will not 'like' this book. But it is an important book to read. This book makes the reader think about many issues: foster care, the kids enmeshed in the system, homophobia, parents who hate their children because of who they are, racism, and abject poverty ... It’s hard to identify with the young people Berg talks about; at the same time it is impossible not to feel an affinity for their pain and their despair. That’s what makes this book easy to put down but impossible to ignore.
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