After four different foster placements, Min is back at Children's Aid a week before Christmas. She has no family, no birthday, no idea of where she came from. Then Jess Hart, a former Children's Aid doctor who sees past Min's hardened shell, decides to take Min home for the holidays. Has Min found her place at last?

"Maddy Adriana knows that magic is real. All her life, her heart has pulled her toward things too perfect to be ordinary, things no one else can see. And then there's the bracelet she's worn since she was a baby; a bracelet that grows as she grows and doesn't come off. Knowing that magic exists has made it a little easier to be a foster kid bounced between homes. Then, one day, Maddy feels a ... tug. It leads her to Il Circo delle Strade, the magical...

California: Twelve-year-old Melanie has been in foster care her whole life, moving from home to home--unloved and unwanted. She has found a kind of happiness with her recent foster family, Delilah and Ray. But Melanie has a secret, one she knows she can never share. Someone talks to Melanie, a presence no-one else can see or hear. Melanie calls her Penny and Penny has a message for her: something very bad is about to happen. New York: Louise has spent...

"When Dahlia decided to become a foster mother, she had a few caveats: no howling newborns, no delinquents, and above all, no girls. A harrowing incident years before left her a virtual prisoner in her own home, forever wary of the heartbreak and limitation of a girl's life. Eleven years after they began fostering, Dahlia and Louie consider their family complete, but when the social worker begs them to take a young girl who has been horrifically abused...

Like everyone else in the Panopticon, 15-year-old Anais Hendricks has been in and out of foster care practically since birth. "[B]orn in a nuthouse to nobody that was ever seen again, " she had her only successful foster placement with a prostitute later stabbed to death (Anais found the body). She's been sent to this facility, where the inmates are under constant surveillance, because she had a bad history with a policewoman who has been bludgeoned...

What is the cost of motherhood? When The Risk of Us opens, we meet a forty-something woman who deeply wants to become a mother. The path that opens up to her and her husband takes them through the foster care system, with the goal of adoption. And when seven-year-old Maresa comes into their lives, with her inch-deep dimples and a voice that can beam them to the moon, their hearts fill with love. But her rages and troubles threaten to crack open their...

As children in foster care, Cecilia and Robin vowed they would be the sisters each had never had. Now superstar singer-songwriter Cecilia lives life on the edge, but when Robin is nearly killed in an accident, Cecilia drops everything to be with her. Robin set aside her career as a successful photojournalist to create the loving family she always yearned for. But gazing through a wide-angle lens at both past and future, she sees that her marriage...

Otto the squirrel reluctantly becomes a foster parent when a strange, furry creature hatches outside his home, saying nothing but "Pio" and growing very, very quickly.

"This novel follows two friends, one Black and one white, who grew up wards of the state in New York. As adults, Ray has found success while Scotty struggles, but both seek love, comfort, and a place in the world"--