A kaleidoscope of women comes to life in Victoria Rowell's thoughtful memoir: Pragmatic New Englanders. Aristocratic ballet teachers. Heavily medicated divorcees. They are among the dozen or so women who raised her after mental illness waylaid her birth mother. But the author herself is the most compelling figure in the book. It helps that Rowell -- a dancer turned actress best known for her role on the long-running CBS soap opera "The Young and the Restless" -- writes with skill. Her story contains enough twists and turns to bring it squarely within the familiar framework of the Celebrity Autobiography.

But economic language and Rowell's sharp eye for detail and a firm grasp of reporting -- including key, well-sourced background on the racial history of Maine -- combine to lift this work well above the usual celebrity memoir train wreck. If you felt manipulated after reading Suzanne Somers's turgid 1988 weeper, "Keeping Secrets," or just plain ticked off after suffering through Anne Heche's 2001 freak-out, "Call Me Crazy," Rowell manages to restore your faith in the genre. Her book contains no lurid tales of incest, bloody thrashings by alcoholic fathers or late-breaking disclosures of long-lost parents. Rowell's story of multiple "mothers" begins in Maine, where she was born, and describes, via her unique circumstances, a big picture of foster care in America. This picture is not pretty, crisscrossed as it is with bureaucratic bungling, archaic racial restrictions, and wrenching separations from loving caretakers.

The first rupture happened when Rowell was around 2. Her birth mother, Dorothy Mabel Bevan Sawyer Collins Rowell, was the schizophrenic daughter of a rock-ribbed white Yankee family in Maine. She had married a white man, but after nine years of marriage to Norman Rowell, Dorothy began to stray. By the time Dorothy and Norman divorced, she had dallied with a succession of black and Hispanic men, including a "dashing young sailor" who became Victoria's biological father. "I want to believe that this man and Dorothy Collins Rowell had more than a passing lust for each other," Rowell writes.

After Dorothy's collapse, Victoria was taken in as a foster child by a white, middle-aged "can-do Mainer" named Bertha C. Taylor. She was welcomed into a nurturing environment that included Bertha's husband and a close circle of women who'd been Bertha's friends for years.

Rowell traces her earliest memories to that tiny town of Gray, Maine, "population 2,100 . . . approximately 99.9 percent Caucasian in the early 1960s." The town's racial mix (or lack thereof) ultimately convinced child welfare authorities to rethink their agreement to send Victoria to live with the Taylors: "It would be easy for us to leave Vicki in a home where we know she is loved and well cared for and to close our eyes and minds to what life would hold for her in ten and fifteen years hence," officials wrote to Bertha. ". . . We must face the fact that the same people who love her at age two might feel differently when she is in her teens. . . . We also know that Vicki herself is going to be aware of the 'differences' as the years pass, and she will have problems to work out living in a totally white community." She survived the separation but poignantly recounts the toll it took on Bertha and her husband, who "could never bring themselves to foster another child." Accordingly, Rowell counts herself lucky for having emerged with her identity intact, plus a reasonably sunny outlook.

Rowell's next home was also in Maine, but with an African American family with deep roots in Boston. The matriarch, Agatha Wooten Armstead, was a formidable character who taught Victoria by her thrifty and industrious example: "The pianist, the painter, the writer, the gardener, the entrepreneur -- she was who she was, distinguished in who she was, living her own life regardless of the opinions, gossip or condescension of others," Rowell writes. Agatha's confidence in Vicki helped persuade the girl to pursue her interest in ballet. And by age 10, with Agatha's tearful farewell, Rowell was on a Trailways bus to Middlesex County, Mass., where she began studying with Esther Brooks, the "stunningly elegant" proprietress of the Cambridge School of Ballet. Over the next two decades, Rowell moved between Boston, New York and, finally, Los Angeles, from novice ballerina to her present standing as a respected film and television actress. Her long road through the nation's foster care system has led her to form her own foundation and become an advocate for improving the system. She emerges a passionate though clear-eyed realist, thankful for the opportunities she experienced but keenly aware that too many other foster children aren't so lucky.