Hope is our emotional gray area between love and hate — neither a malignant nor a benign force, sometimes acting to stay our hand from action and other times the only thing waking us up in the morning, hope is something we struggle to maintain throughout our lives. This struggle could scarcely be captured better than in writer Andrew Bridge’s debut work Hope’s Boy: A Memoir.

Exploring Andrew’s childhood in the Los Angeles foster care system, the book paints a cruel picture of an institution that very literally robs children of parents and safety with the flimsiest of reasoning and the most heartless of machinations. Andrew holds tightly to the not-even-two-years he is able to spend with his mother, Hope, before the system snatches him up.

With no support from his ever-changing array of social workers, he is bandied between a care facility that has long forgotten human dignity and a foster family whose matriarch, I shudder to think, might be exactly as frightening and monstrous as she is portrayed to be.

This is a story of survival, and at times you feel that, truly, all hope is lost, that Andrew is doomed to a cycle of pain and misfortune that you feel sure would break you. But he learns and adapts, he keeps on going, never releasing the few good memories he is able to carry with him.

Part of what makes this structure work is Andrew’s narration, which has no desire to supply easy answers, bleeding heart sentiment or even personal forgiveness for the author’s actions. He comes by his words honestly, but often they are cold in the way he is able to analyze people down to their composite features and actions. For each of Andrew’s faults, he is able to blame himself profoundly and logically, and while it’s a cliché to call a memoir “honest,” that’s exactly how it reads — an unabashed personal account.

This logical eye of his will have mixed results with people though — at times Andrew, while clinging to his hope, sounds very much downtrodden and beaten by the world, and does little to deny it. This makes sense in a narrative, but it’s a pain carried perhaps too well in the story, to the point that scenes with emotional highs or lows can feel pulled into a much grayer area. Though I enjoy the style, it may conflict with some who will see a boy about to be torn apart by a ravenous dog and find themselves somewhat numb.

That aside, I was mesmerized, having not read a memoir this good almost ever. I found myself needing to look at the page numbers to remember that this wasn’t happening to me.

Hope’s Boy makes me want to hold on, with even half the determination that Andrew shows, to everything good in my life.