Everyone admires families who adopt hard-to-place children; they are often praised as modern-day heroes. But like the tragic heroes of old, adoptive parents tumble from great heights if they expose fears or second thoughts, and they often confront scorn and blame if their children have problems. In a sensitive and sobering account, Ann Kimble Loux breaks this unwritten code of silence with the painful story of her family's adoption of two abused sisters and the traumatic years that followed.

In 1974, Loux and her husband, already the biological parents of three children, had no idea how their lives would change with the addition of young Margey and Dawn, ages three and four.

In writing this book twenty years later, Loux is finally coming to terms with the distressing mixture of hope and disillusionment, of love, frustration, and overwhelming guilt that has characterized her relationships with her two daughters. Both young women have settled down in their mid-twenties, but their extended adolescences were a terrifying swirl of school delinquency and dropout, pregnancy, prostitution, and drug abuse.

Margey has recently moved from prostitution and drug addiction to steady work and relationships. Although Dawn dropped out of high school and had two children before she was twenty-one, she and her husband have proved to be loving and reliable parents. The ending of Margey's and Dawn's stories are as indefinite as anyone's, but both young women are much more at peace with themselves, and Loux has grown to respect and accept her daughters' choices.

In The Limits of Hope, Ann Kimble Loux conveys affectingly and disturbingly the social and individual human costs of child abuse and neglect, calling for reforms in the adoption process. She speaks forcefully about the needs of adoptive families and urges adoption agencies to offer continuing support to parents as well as children. She speaks more forcefully still about the obligation of adoption services to disclose fully background information about potential adoptees.

Loux presents her cautionary tale not to discourage prospective adoptive parents but to urge them to become more informed.