Reviews & Endorsments

Praise for Nobody's Daughter

Nobody's Daughter is an epic survival story of a seemingly ordinary girl from Chicago struggling to give herself what her mother, father, foster parents, and our social safety nets could not. You will feel for little Jeanette and root for young Jan. Ultimately, America must learn from her and become its best self to these most vulnerable among us—our children.

— MARK DOSTERT Author, Up in Here: Jailing Kids on Chicago's Other Side

There are some topics that people just don’t talk about, making healing and progress difficult for survivors of abuse and neglect. This story is a testament to one woman’s resilience, her drive to understand what happened, and a determination to break the intergenerational trauma that she experienced, for the sake of her child. It’s a must read for clinicians to understand a survivor’s perspective but also for survivors to feel seen, understood, and to gain inspiration for a better future.

— TRACEY WILSON HEISLER, MA Author, The Shadow in Our Lives

Book Review of Nobody’s Daughter: My Quest for a Family

D. Donovan

Senior Reviewer

Midwest Book Review

Nobody's Daughter: My Quest for a Family is a work of creative nonfiction by author Jan Keyes’ which offers a portrait based of her life from when she becomes a ward of the state at age eight. Through child's eyes, she vividly portrays her family's maltreatment of her, the terror of being in institutions and in foster care, and how those experiences affected her life and the reality of not belonging to anyone.

The memoir opens with an attempted suicide of her as a desolate, single young mother. The book’s theme reveals itself when Jan changes course, realizing she must remain alive in order to care for her daughter, and so chooses not to end her life. She then resolves to step up to her parental responsibilities, which are in stark contrast to her own mother who left her locked in a detention facility as a ward of the state - the cause of losing her own family. (In this preface, she recalls how she felt after her mother abandoned her, reliving the terrorizing memory detailed in Chapter 3.)

Remarkably, Jan took back her life from the state and lived on her own at sixteen; but by nineteen she had a baby of her own to care for. The journey that follows reflects her fervent desire to create a sense of normalcy for her daughter as she tries to give her daughter what she never had.

Especially poignant are the encounters she faces along the way, including attempts at making a family with foster parents who prove mercurial in their perceptions of the role foster children should assume in their lives.

More so than most accounts of foster children, family, adoption, and survival, Nobody's Daughter: My Quest for a Family offers the potential for greater understanding about family origins, decisions, and the impact of being a foster child wanted by nobody. Its personal reflections and assessments introduce valuable insights to foster parents, adoptive parents, and other surrogates called upon to assume family roles.

Another unique aspect of the story lies in the challenge of tackling motherhood without having the experience of what a "normal" family is. She compensates by engaging with other in-tact families for meaningful family experiences for herself and her daughter.

As she matures, Keyes looks for opportunities to build her career, and, during the social revolution of the 60s-70s, she learns to grow spiritually and emotionally, by developing a positive outlook. She unburdens from her past by allowing herself to forgive those who have mistreated her. In Chapter 30, “You create your own reality,” becomes her mantra. This may offer hope and inspiration to many burdened by similar childhood traumas.

The jump from being a foster child, experiencing homelessness, and living in a detention facility to constructing new paradigms for family and love, nearly from scratch, makes Nobody's Daughter a vivid story of overcoming nearly impossible odds to succeed not just as a parent, but as an entrepreneur, wife, and well-rounded individual.

Keyes navigates a host of questions and possibilities surrounding her own tumultuous childhood and her impact on a future generation, reviewing issues common to parents and families both intact and struggling. These, in turn, will lead to avid book club discussions in a wide group of readers, from parenting circles to psychology students and family social workers, child welfare policymakers, and researchers documenting the psychological and social impacts of foster care on society.

This topic and Keyes’s treatment of it holds a LOT of potential audience interest, and is more diverse than usual, in this respect.

Libraries that choose Nobody's Daughter: My Quest for a Family for their collections will want to very highly recommend the saga for its powerful inspections of family concepts, creation, interactions, and choices. The story’s ability to delve into the heart of relationship-building, family adversity, and intentional community make its wide-ranging considerations of equally broad interest, all delivered with a vivid attention to detail and analysis of family ties that will shake even the firmest foundation of readers who believed they knew what family bonds entailed.