DAMAGED ANGELS: An Adoptive Mother Discovers the Tragic Toll of Alcohol in Pregnancy

One day, clicking around on the family computer, Buxton found her 14-year-old adopted daughter Colette's will. What might have been a typical angst-filled document by another teenager was quite worrisome in this case: Colette suffered from fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD), an impairment that affects one out of every 100 North Americans, according to Buxton. The disorder made her violent and antisocial. By the time Colette wrote the will, she was addicted to drugs and prone to violent outbursts; before she was 18, she had endured multiple brushes with death. Canadian journalist Buxton thoroughly describes her frustrating attempts to get help for her two daughters (another adopted daughter also suffered from FASD). Her honesty and humility are blunt: "The fact that Brian [her husband] and I could make each other laugh at least once a day, often making evil jokes about our children, was what kept us relatively sane...." The devil really is in the details in this sometimes painful account. On the one hand, Buxton's insistence on logging the minutiae of caring for her daughters is impressive, and she intersperses these sections with copious research and case studies on FASDs. On the other hand, her recounting of umpteen doctors' appointments, forms and phone calls weighs the memoir down and buries some salient gems. (May)