HPL National Foster Care Month 2025

"The shocking, deeply reported story of a murder-suicide that claimed the lives of six children-and a searing indictment of the American foster care system"-- Provided by publisher. On March 26, 2018, rescue workers discovered a crumpled SUV and the bodies of two women and several children at the bottom of a cliff beside the Pacific Coast Highway. Investigators soon concluded that the crash was a murder-suicide, but there was more to the story: Jennifer...

After being placed in foster care, Paula Vauss grows up to become a tough divorce attorney only to have her life thrown into chaos by an astonishing revelation and a cryptic message from the mother she has not seen in years.

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing...

An intimate, authoritative look at the foster care system that examines why it is failing the kids it is supposed to protect and what can be done to change it.

Lindsay and Kerrie Ann are sisters who have known hardship from an early age, when their mother was sent to prison and they were separated and sent into foster care. Thirty years later, Lindsay is still trying to reconnect with her little sister. When they are finally reunited , neither sister's expectations are met. Kerrie Ann feels intimidated by the "classy," more educated Lindsay, while Lindsay is dismayed by Kerrie Ann's streetwise ways. They...

"A spare, lyrical Native American coming of age story set in rural Oklahoma in the late 1980s. With his single mother in jail, Sequoyah, a fifteen-year-old Cherokee boy, is placed in foster care with the Troutt family. Literally and figuratively scarred by his unstable upbringing, Sequoyah has spent years mostly keeping to himself, living with his emotions pressed deep below the surface--that is, until he meets the seventeen-year-old Rosemary, another...

"From the 1920s through 1950, Georgia Tann ran a black-market baby business at the Tennessee Children's Home Society in Memphis. She offered up more than 5,000 orphans tailored to the wish lists of eager parents--hiding the fact that many weren't orphans at all, but stolen children of poor families, desperate single mothers, and women told in maternity words that their babies died. The publication of Lisa Wingate's novel Before We Were Yours brought...

When Pete and Ellie choose to start a family, they stumble headfirst into the world of foster care adoption. After they learn their perfect foster child comes with two other siblings, Pete and Ellie find themselves speeding from zero to three kids overnight and must hilariously learn the ropes of instant parenthood if they hope to become a real family.