A story both shocking and educating, young women having babies while they themselves are too young to take care of themselves, much less a child. Told from the perspective of a foster mother who fosters both the young women and their babies, I found myself totally engrossed in how she helps build a future for both. This is definitely not a story you'd hear everyday but the reminder shows us how it is all too easy to make assumptions and penalize before you know the facts. This story is very good but it will leave you unsettled, thinking about the book long after you've finished.

Reading this book had me going through a rollercoaster of emotions throughout the book. Sadness, hope, love and amazement all cycled throughout me as I "turned' the pages of this book. The author knows how to relay the true facts of her life and what she has been through so that you can feel and experience what it was like for her. The author is an inspiration and embraces the values that I wish more of the people in this world embraced.

I want to start off by saying thank you for the opportunity to read and review this book, it was a very good read easy to follow along with storyline and characters. This was a new author for me but I very much enjoyed it, thank you for the opportunity and I look forward to reading more by this author again. I highly recommend this book to everybody.

Wicked Girl is the first book by Jeanie Doyle about the start of her 20 years of experience as a foster carer. She details her past, which as a single mother of her first child, having been raped at a young age and left to bring up her child without support from her family, made her ideally placed to understand some of the issues young mothers may well feel. Jeanie details the first few cases she, alongside her husband and three children, deal with as a mother and baby foster placement.
The young mothers, still children themselves, are scared and very vulnerable and Jeanie’s ability to care and nurture them shines through in this book. She is a foster carer that any child in care would hope to be placed with.
The book covers dark subjects but Jeanie balances the dark moments with times of light to make the book a very interesting and uplifting read.
Thanks to NetGalley for a Kindle copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the advanced copy of this book.

I enjoyed reading this, it's written in an easy to read style, and I finished it in only a couple of days.

Jeanie's stories (both her own and the foster children's) are heartbreaking but so interesting and this ensures the book is as gripping as it is harrowing.

I feel as though the writing style could have been improved somewhat. In my opinion it was a little heavy on metaphors and unnecessarily detailed descriptions in places and this did take away from my overall enjoyment.

Having said that, I did ultimately enjoy this book and I would read more from this author.

Thanks to Netgalley for the free ebook to review!

Wow. Such a hard and impactful book. Jeanie is a foster mom and has been with her family for over 20 years. It takes a special kind of person to do foster care and to continually take on kiddos with a hard past who can be hard to love at times. Foster care has always had a special place in my heart and thank you to Jeanie for sharing your stories about foster care ❤️

I loved this book. It was such a good read. This woman is amazing can't wait to hear some more true stories from this woman

This book was difficult for me to read. I struggled to get past the writing style, which I did not like. I did not enjoy this book, but I think it was the writing that really sealed this book's fate for me.

Jeanie Doyle is a mother, grandmother and foster mother. Or rather, her family is a foster family.
In her autobiographical book “Wicked Girl” she makes it very clear how involved her husband and children were and how fostering is a decision you need to make together, because it changes life for everyone.
The story begins not with the foster children, but with her own childhood and early motherhood, the years that made her want to care for people, for children, and more than just her own.
She takes us through the steps it takes to become a foster family, the decisions her and her husband had to make before they finally had the first child in their care.
Her storytelling has the same patient and caring, motherly tone I imagine her to use at home raising her children. She takes the time to get to know each child, understand their background, and relays their story to us in a way that makes us empathise despite their sometime far from exemplary behaviour.
The book focuses on less than a handful of children, mostly young mothers and babies, who were in Jeanie’s care and I wish there had been more individual stories. She alludes to many other cases, but we never get to know them, which is a shame.
It seems we have a lot more to learn from Jeanie Doyle about empathy, education and the foster system.

I picked up this one as I am a big fan of Cathy Glass’s books and this was based on a similar theme.

I really enjoyed the book. It was great to hear about Jeane’s background and the experiences which propelled her into becoming a foster carer, especially working with young mothers.

Foster carers do an amazing job and after reading this you will have an even bigger respect for what them and what they do.

This book was just heartbreaking and a tough read but I did enjoy this book but maybe not as much as I expected it to. I will be interested to see how more people react to this book because I, myself, am unsure of how I feel. The writing style made it an easy read.

Wicked Girl is my first Jeanie real life story of fostering. The story seems higgledy piggledy and tells the story of 2 separate true life fostering lives, along with a little about Jeanie's lifestory. It is hard to read the difficulties these children had to face but then, we wouldn't care if it wasn't hard for us to read. I was gripped by the two girls story but delighted to read they overcame their early life problems. I would read another of Jeanie's memoirs.

This book just like it states in the description is very re mindful of a Cathy Glass novel which I was interested in because I love her stories. The book starts out with our main character Jeanine getting a call that she will be getting a new placement, a new born baby that has no one, and hopefully social services will be able to track down the young mother who delivered her. What I liked about this book that was different than other foster memoirs that I've read before was our author talked about her history before she started fostering and what led her do make that incredible selfless act. It was nice to get a rounded background on our main character, and it also made the interactions with the foster child much more understandable and eye opening on why Jeanine
chose to get into that field of work. I do wish that this novel talked more about the time that the child was in the home instead of all about how our Jeanine became a foster mother and the hoops she had to go through because of her past. I found this book a little hard to get into. Not my favourite read however I believe that if I would have know a little bit about how it was going to be written I would have had a better grasp on what was happening. What I did like about the story though was it was very easy to sympathies with our characters and I wish that no one has to ever go through what this poor little girl did.

A really good book from a new voice in fostering memoirs.

Jeanie Doyle has been a foster carer for over 20 years. She's also a mother and grandmother. She's now writing about her experiences-this is her first book. If you like Cathy Glass, Maggie Hartley, Casey Watson, Angela Hart etc, Jeanie's books should appeal to you too.

So, are these books very samey? Or do they have something different to bring from the other foster carer memoirs? Many of us read these type of books. We wait patiently for each new Cathy Glass, Casey Watson etc-they bring out about two new books a year. Here's another author to satisfy our reading need; very similar style, easy to read, likeable. A welcome addition. I really enjoyed this book, and read it in under a couple of days.

Not just another foster memoir book. A different angle, she has something different to bring. She has tough experiences of her own to call on. She certainly has a backstory which gave her the reason to become a foster carer. This does have another dimension, and is not just another one of these type of books. Not as expected-the early part of book focuses on the foster carer herself; her life, her life in the past. But that's what makes this book different. You can see what drove her to caring for others. She's been there. She can help others from her experiences.

After discovering this new voice in fostering memoirs, I was excited to get stuck in. I made the mistake of reading a lukewarm review before starting it. Luckily, I wasn't put off-this book was great, I'm so glad I found it, and looking forward to reading more of Jeanie Doyle's series.

Jeanie Doyle tells a heart wrenching true story about her life as a young teen mom abandoned by her father in her time of need. In the face of adversity, challenge, neglect, and fear, Jeanie managed to find a way of putting her child first. Her resilience as persistence lead the way in her harrowing account, leaving any reader with heartache and joy over her triumph.
I read through Jeanie's story furiously. I could never critique the content of her story as it is the fabric of her story. Although very easy to read, I do believe short chapters and a better timeline would have made this story even better. At times, flashbacks and present time were difficult in transition.
All in all, I would highly recommend this story to anyone! I loved reading about her life and how she was able to help so many foster children!

Based on the true stories of some of the many children Jeanie and Bill and their own 3 children have helped over there years of fostering . This book covers two separate girls stories that manifested in completely different ways but the eventual outcome was a good. Although not necessarily an enjoyable read it was nevertheless written in an easy style.
I look forward to reading more of Jeanie and Bill's accounts.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing this book in exchange for an honest review.
I have read quite a few books by foster parents and this one was good too. I like that the author and foster mom writes about her experiences as a young mom and how she incorporates her life experiences into helping these children.
I hope she will write more books about her fostering. As much of a depressing subject these stories are, they're also important to raise awareness of the need for foster parents.

Look out for the first book by a new voice in fostering
I’ve read a lot of fostering nonfiction and I was excited by this new author. I was very impressed. Jeanie’s own story is woven in with the tales of Angela, then Susan - both teen mums but with very different circumstances. Jeanie writes very much like Rosie Lewis, and there’s a strong hint at the end that another book will follow! One to watch for sure.

I have always read Cathy glass and enjoy her style of writing so was expecting this book to be similar and in many respects it was!
It’s very sobering to be reminded of the stigma and abuse that took place here and in Ireland not so very long ago and the long term repercussions it had for so many! However foster carers do so much valuable work to help these poor damaged children experience normal family life and feel safe and loved whilst in their care and it is truely heartwarming to read their success stories.
Thank you net galley for this early read.

Jeanie Doyle is a woman who has experienced hardship and gone on to help others. Falling pregnant out of wedlock as a teenager in Ireland, she moves to England and starts a new life with her daughter and when she meets her husband they decide to start fostering children. The children mentioned in this book are all teenage mothers so something that Jeanie can relate to. My issue with this book is that she seems a little judgemental of the girls. One decided not to keep her baby and it seems Jeanie struggles to comprehend that decision. It's not a bad read and I got through it in under a day.