Advance Praise for Book

We grew up in foster care being spoken about collectively, as though displacement produces one kind of child: dangerous or desolate. One experience. One story. This memoir refuses that simplicity.

T.M. Collins tells her story from inside the displacement, where homes change, and people disappear and reappear. I knew some of these same rooms and people, and still discovered how much I had missed.

She shows us what it was like to be her while it was happening, what it cost her, and what she has claimed since. We shared moments, but she lived a life that was entirely her own. Still, I cried in places I didn’t expect and laughed at moments so painfully familiar I recognized them.

Those of us who lived in the system will find pages that make us say, Yep. That’s exactly how it went. Everyone else gets a chance to learn what they never realized they were missing.

This is unapologetically one woman’s story. Yet she makes room for the rest of us: foster kids who have never seen our lives reflected honestly, the people who love us, and those inside the system who need to see the human lives beyond a case file. We were never one story. We were millions. This is hers.

~ A.T. Kuehn, The sister

Foster Kid Fierce: Road Trip to Freedom by Theresa Collins is a testament to the resiliency of the human spirit. Collins crafted a world with excellent writing, a sophisticated structure, vivid storytelling, and a compelling narrative arc all set with front matter that serves as a call to action for the reader to rethink what she thought she knew about foster care.

While this is a childhood trauma story, the author doesn’t tell it from the point of view of a victim, but rather as a strong woman who is a product of her upbringing—a welcome rarity in this genre. She doesn’t hold back in telling the harrowing details of her youth; she earned her ultimate triumph, which will continue to inspire me long after the last page was read.

The reader is left with a profound understanding that all life is inherently good and serves to remind us of the sacredness of humanity regardless of outward appearances, especially in children who are the most vulnerable.

~ Tara Meissner Huck, author of Stress Fracture: A Memoir of Psychosis