What do you think?
Rate this book
Like a Child to Home
November on the Canadian West Coast; it's often wet, miserable and dark. Lives get messy; streets are unsafe.
Wally Rose is a brooding, sporadically up-beat, old-time social worker. Carla Prentice is an overwhelmed, single mother of two teenagers, one who has lost his way, another who may be losing hers. The Prentice family, paralyzed by fear and silence, can barely keep a lid on their out-of-control lives.
Wally is juggling a convoluted caseload of youth, each coping with more than their fair share of adolescent struggles, the taxing muddle of leftover family distress, and a baffling child welfare system they are submerged in. An old file comes back to bedevil Wally. A habitual line-crosser, he may have pushed his luck one too many times.
Wally has been "nurturing" kids and fellow workers for decades. He has little patience for red tape and is a thorn in the side of his employer. He is also running out of gas. He hopes he can fill his tank one more time, not only to save himself, and those he cares for, from a capricious system, but also to draw his career to a close on his own terms.
"This is a riveting story that grabbed me from its first pages. I can't remember ever reading a more realistic and entertaining tale of child protection work, or social work in general. But beyond that niche, it is a story that readers of dramatic fiction will connect with and enjoy. It is an engaging story with sympathetic and nuanced characters who will stay in readers' thoughts long after they have finished reading the book."
- Sarah Stewart - Editor
Wally Rose is a brooding, sporadically up-beat, old-time social worker. Carla Prentice is an overwhelmed, single mother of two teenagers, one who has lost his way, another who may be losing hers. The Prentice family, paralyzed by fear and silence, can barely keep a lid on their out-of-control lives.
Wally is juggling a convoluted caseload of youth, each coping with more than their fair share of adolescent struggles, the taxing muddle of leftover family distress, and a baffling child welfare system they are submerged in. An old file comes back to bedevil Wally. A habitual line-crosser, he may have pushed his luck one too many times.
Wally has been "nurturing" kids and fellow workers for decades. He has little patience for red tape and is a thorn in the side of his employer. He is also running out of gas. He hopes he can fill his tank one more time, not only to save himself, and those he cares for, from a capricious system, but also to draw his career to a close on his own terms.
"This is a riveting story that grabbed me from its first pages. I can't remember ever reading a more realistic and entertaining tale of child protection work, or social work in general. But beyond that niche, it is a story that readers of dramatic fiction will connect with and enjoy. It is an engaging story with sympathetic and nuanced characters who will stay in readers' thoughts long after they have finished reading the book."
- Sarah Stewart - Editor
248 pages, Hardcover
First published July 2, 2013
2 people are currently reading
15 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 29, 2014
Like a Child to Home
What is the real value of a child’s life?
This author presents a portrait of a social worker, Wally Rose, whose major attributes are compassion, patience, commitment and resilience. Readers of Like a Child to Home will hopefully come to better understand how hard it can be to gain the trust of injured youth.
Often this bond of trust is a prerequisite to help young people find answers or accept advice and direction. Readers will also come to understand how easy it is for these young people to transform their fears into aggressiveness and isolation as they struggle with family distress, drug use and violence.
Without support from experienced people, the choices young people make can tarnish their lives forever. For any society this is a disgrace. Even though the value of a child’s life is incommensurable, sometimes social workers are limited by the very system they toil in.
The author presents many different cases and diverse ways of handling them. The main case, peppered through the novel, showcases the story of the Prentice family, the mother Carla, her son Jordan, who is already living on the street, and her daughter Skye, who has recently run away from home and the efforts to return her home and effect a family reunification.
As I was reading the book I had the sensation of being there with the social workers and facing together their need to make decisions, trying mightily to put into place resolutions that will be in the best interest of each child. Bill puts so well on paper the pressure of such a job that I can fully understand his choice to take an early retirement. As he has made clear, this work need a lot of commitment and dedication, and the social workers’ personal life is often secondary.
Bill Engleson’s first novel, Like a Child to Home, is a powerful and original take on what it means to be a social worker. While not a typical read, it is an interesting one.
What is the real value of a child’s life?
This author presents a portrait of a social worker, Wally Rose, whose major attributes are compassion, patience, commitment and resilience. Readers of Like a Child to Home will hopefully come to better understand how hard it can be to gain the trust of injured youth.
Often this bond of trust is a prerequisite to help young people find answers or accept advice and direction. Readers will also come to understand how easy it is for these young people to transform their fears into aggressiveness and isolation as they struggle with family distress, drug use and violence.
Without support from experienced people, the choices young people make can tarnish their lives forever. For any society this is a disgrace. Even though the value of a child’s life is incommensurable, sometimes social workers are limited by the very system they toil in.
The author presents many different cases and diverse ways of handling them. The main case, peppered through the novel, showcases the story of the Prentice family, the mother Carla, her son Jordan, who is already living on the street, and her daughter Skye, who has recently run away from home and the efforts to return her home and effect a family reunification.
As I was reading the book I had the sensation of being there with the social workers and facing together their need to make decisions, trying mightily to put into place resolutions that will be in the best interest of each child. Bill puts so well on paper the pressure of such a job that I can fully understand his choice to take an early retirement. As he has made clear, this work need a lot of commitment and dedication, and the social workers’ personal life is often secondary.
Bill Engleson’s first novel, Like a Child to Home, is a powerful and original take on what it means to be a social worker. While not a typical read, it is an interesting one.
October 20, 2013
Bill Engleson’s "Like a Child to Home" is a thoughtful read that can’t be rushed: it needs to be absorbed and processed. Engleson’s respect and compassion for both the youth in care, and those doing their best to serve them, is evident on every page.
In "Like a Child to Home," through the eyes of social worker Wally Rose, we see snippets of lives lived on the margins and the daunting task faced by those in the system who are charged with relieving the pressure. "Like a Child to Home" reminds us of the serendipity of life that drops you in either Camp Have, or Camp Have-not. That Engleson can thread humour throughout the story, is a testament to both his writing and his survival skills.
In "Like a Child to Home," through the eyes of social worker Wally Rose, we see snippets of lives lived on the margins and the daunting task faced by those in the system who are charged with relieving the pressure. "Like a Child to Home" reminds us of the serendipity of life that drops you in either Camp Have, or Camp Have-not. That Engleson can thread humour throughout the story, is a testament to both his writing and his survival skills.
December 16, 2014
I really enjoyed the first half of this book. It painted a very realistic picture of the world of a social worker in Canada and the youth that come into their care. It also showed the struggles of working within a broken system that is never able to provide enough for those who are involved in it as the worker or the client. It also showed how easy it is to care to much, to become attached and to open yourself to allegations of abuse.
The last quarter of the book seemed to go in a direction I had not been expecting. It felt lacking, like the author was just trying to wrap things up. I suppose that is symbolic in relation to the story but it just left me feeling like I missed something important.
Overall, it is a great read for anyone who is interested in learning about what being a social worker is really like as well as anyone who is interested in learning about the youth that end up in the system.
The last quarter of the book seemed to go in a direction I had not been expecting. It felt lacking, like the author was just trying to wrap things up. I suppose that is symbolic in relation to the story but it just left me feeling like I missed something important.
Overall, it is a great read for anyone who is interested in learning about what being a social worker is really like as well as anyone who is interested in learning about the youth that end up in the system.
July 23, 2014
This book pries open the world of the child protective services worker and gives the reader a significant glimpse of what's inside. It is a brave fictional foray told in 1st person narrative by protagonist Wally Rose, a senior child protection social worker in the Vancouver area of British Columbia, Canada.
Free of psycho-babble, the writing is disciplined, engaging and humanistic. The author is a retired youth protection social worker who spent 25 years delivering front-line services, and 'knows whereof he speaks.'
Bravo, Bill Engleson, on your beautifully crafted tribute to the resilient families, the youth, and the hard-working people with whom you worked in the fascinating and indescribably complex field of child welfare.
December 11, 2020
A true-to-life dark walk in the (gum) shoes of a social worker on the city streets
I found the story quite engrossing, for the most part. Engleson's voice is punchy and terse, reminiscent of old film noir and gumshoe mysteries, despite being set in the true-to-grim-life of modern day social work. The story of Wally Rose immerses the reader in the day to day challenges of social workers dealing with down-and-out families, unfortunate kids on the street, and the oftentimes precarious violence that they navigate. Wally is a compassionate if tired old soul near the end of his long, uneventful career when he becomes embroiled in a professional ethics case that threatens his legacy and his peace of mind. The story is well told, and captures the bittersweet line a caring social worker walks when balancing the interests of his clients and their families against the mountainous bureaucracy the job entails. There were edge-of-your-seat suspenseful moments as well as heart-wrenchingly sad ones. I think I would have enjoyed the book a little more if the author had spent a little less time on the mundane technical frustrations of the job, and more on the mysteriously sad personal life of the downtrodden Wally. It would have made the character even more sympathetic and added a valuable layer to his professional life that is so well portrayed. But then I gather the work is at least somewhat the fictionalized memoir of a long career spent in the field, and so the details are well-earned.
I found the story quite engrossing, for the most part. Engleson's voice is punchy and terse, reminiscent of old film noir and gumshoe mysteries, despite being set in the true-to-grim-life of modern day social work. The story of Wally Rose immerses the reader in the day to day challenges of social workers dealing with down-and-out families, unfortunate kids on the street, and the oftentimes precarious violence that they navigate. Wally is a compassionate if tired old soul near the end of his long, uneventful career when he becomes embroiled in a professional ethics case that threatens his legacy and his peace of mind. The story is well told, and captures the bittersweet line a caring social worker walks when balancing the interests of his clients and their families against the mountainous bureaucracy the job entails. There were edge-of-your-seat suspenseful moments as well as heart-wrenchingly sad ones. I think I would have enjoyed the book a little more if the author had spent a little less time on the mundane technical frustrations of the job, and more on the mysteriously sad personal life of the downtrodden Wally. It would have made the character even more sympathetic and added a valuable layer to his professional life that is so well portrayed. But then I gather the work is at least somewhat the fictionalized memoir of a long career spent in the field, and so the details are well-earned.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews