Deborah Gold’s, Counting Down: A Memoir of Foster Parenting and Beyond, is a beautiful and poignant story of love, commitment, strength, and understanding. Foster and adoptive parents are its natural audience however Ms. Gold is such an engaging writer that anyone could appreciate this inspirational story about the difficult and often disheartening subject of foster parenting. She shares her 15 year journey through the foster care system with much honesty and some humor whether it’s about her own thoughts and feelings, managing the competing interests of the foster care system, or her at times complicated involvement with a birth family and a birth mother, also striving to do what they believed was “right” for the children. Counting Down is an excellent memoir underscoring persistence, acceptance and hope.