Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | A Child Called: One Child’s Courage to Survive | 1995 | Dave Pelzer | Buy |
| 2 | The Lost Boy: A Foster Child’s Search for the Love of a Family | 1997 | Dave Pelzer | Buy |
| 3 | A Man Named Dave: A Story of Triumph and Forgiveness | 1999 | Dave Pelzer | Buy |
| 4 | My Story | 2002 | Dave Pelzer | Buy |
| 5 | The Privilege of Youth: A Teenager’s Story | 2004 | Dave Pelzer | Buy |
| 6 | Too Close to Me: The Middle-Aged Consequences of Revealing a Child Called It | 2014 | Dave Pelzer | Buy |
| 7 | Return to the River | 2023 | Dave Pelzer | Buy |
A Child Called It became one of the best-selling memoirs of the 1990s almost by accident. Dave Pelzer’s account of the abuse he suffered as a child in California struck a nerve with readers in a way that few similar books had managed, partly because of the directness of his writing and partly because the story did not end in despair. The book opens on the morning he was finally removed from his mother’s home, framing what follows as a story about survival rather than victimhood.
The follow-up books expand the picture considerably. The Lost Boy covers the foster care system he moved through as a teenager, and A Man Named Dave picks up in his adult years as he tries to build a stable life and reconcile with the past. My Story collects all three into a single volume. The Privilege of Youth and Too Close to Me circle back to earlier periods, the first offering a companion perspective on his foster care years, the second reflecting on the unexpected consequences of publishing his story.
Return to the River, published in 2023, is the most recent addition and brings Pelzer’s account up to later life. Readers who have followed the series from the beginning will find it a fitting continuation of a story that has always been about more than what happened to him as a child.