This collection contains materials on the topic of foster care from the DIVerse Families bibliography. Foster care stories discuss children and teenagers who are put through the foster care system and are now being taken care of by foster families, which include foster parents and foster siblings. In many of these stories, foster care can, but not always, eventually lead to adoption.
Family relationships grow through the connections we create with the people in our lives. Your family can be made of blood or non-blood relatives, friends, or pets, or a combination of these. Diverse families and their relationships are slowly becoming the new norm and will only continue to grow as the world progresses.
Browse by Family Relationship:
-
A Different Home: A New Foster Child's Story
John DeGarmo and Kelly DeGarmo
When Jessie is placed in foster care, she finds it difficult at first but slowly begins to like her new home. First person recount. Story is designed to help children aged 4-10 to settle into care. Includes notes for foster parents.
-
Adoption and Foster Care
Kathlyn Gay
Describes how these placement systems work and reveals the feelings of young people who find homes through adoption and foster care.
-
A Family is a Family is a Family
Sara O'Leary
When a teacher asks the children in her class to think about what makes their families special, the answers are all different in many ways -- but the same in the one way that matters most of all. One child is worried that her family is just too different to explain, but listens as her classmates talk about what makes their families special. One is raised by a grandmother, and another has two dads. One is full of stepsiblings, and another has a new baby.
-
A Forever Family
Roslyn Banish and Jennifer Jordan-Wong
Eight-year-old Jennifer Jordan-Wong describes her adoption by a family after four years of living as a foster child with many different families.
-
After Tupac & D Foster
Jacqueline Woodson
In the New York City borough of Queens in 1996, three girls bond over their shared love of Tupac Shakur's music, as together they try to make sense of the unpredictable world in which they live.
-
A House Between Home: Youth in the Foster Care System
Joyce Libal
Discusses the laws that govern the foster care system, the newest and most innovative programs available today and provides an overview of the history of foster care, including the orphan trains and the British home children.
-
A List of Cages
Robin Roe
When Adam Blake lands the best elective ever in his senior year, serving as an aide to the school psychologist, he thinks he's got it made. Sure, it means a lot of sitting around, which isn't easy for a guy with ADHD, but he can't complain, since he gets to spend the period texting all his friends. Then the doctor asks him to track down the troubled freshman who keeps dodging her, and Adam discovers that the boy is Julian; the foster brother he hasn't seen in five years.
-
All Families are Different
Sol Gordon and Vivien Cohen
Discusses differences in families in today's society, as well as what makes each family special.
-
A Place to Call Home
Jackie French Koller
Biracial Anna, 15, is a strong character in search of love & roots following sexual abuse & rejection from her own family. Caring for her two younger siblings after their unreliable mother abandons them, fifteen-year-old Anna discovers the difficulties of trying to be a parent.
-
April Witch
Majgull Azelsson and Linda Schenck
Desirée lies in a hospital bed thinking, dreaming. Born severely disabled, she cannot walk or talk, but she has other capabilities. Desirée is an April witch, clairvoyant and omniscient, traveling through time and space into the world denied her. The woman who gave Desirée up at birth subsequently took in three foster daughters, who know nothing of the existence of their fourth “sister.” Sensing that her own time is short, Desirée has decided that one of the others has lived the life she herself deserved. One day, each of the three women receives a mysterious letter that forces her to examine her past and her present—setting in motion a complex fugue of memory, regret, and confrontation that builds to a shattering climax.
-
Arcady's Goal
Eugene Yelchin
When twelve-year-old Arcady is sent to a children's home after his parents are declared enemies of the state in Soviet Russia, soccer becomes a way to secure extra rations, respect, and protection but it may also be his way out if he can believe in and love another person--and himself.
-
At the Bottom of the World (Jack and the Geniuses Series #1)
Bill Nye and Gregory Mone
Traveling to Antarctica for a prestigious science competition, twelve-year-old Jack and his genius foster siblings, Ava and Matt, become caught up in a mystery involving a missing scientist.
-
Billy Had to Move: A Foster Care Story
Theresa Ann Fraser
Child Protection Services have been involved with Billy and his mother for some time now. He has been happily settled in a kinship placement with his grandmother and enjoys his pet cat, interacting with neighbors and even taking piano lessons. As the story unfolds, Billy's grandmother has unexpectedly passed away and so the story of Billy Had To Move begins. Unfortunately, Billy's mother cannot be located. Mr. Murphy, Billy's social worker, places him in the foster home of Amy, Tim, and their baby "Colly." Billy experiences great loss resulting not only from his grandmother's death, but also the loss of the life he knew. Billy's inner journey therefore has also begun and with the help of Ms. Woods, a Play Therapist, there is hope.
-
Blood Family
Anne Fine
A boy with an abusive father grows up and fears that he has the same potential for violence as his father has.
-
Bronxwood
Coe Booth
Tyrell's life is spinning out of control after his father is released from prison, his little brother is placed in foster care, and the drug dealers he's living with are pressuring him to start dealing.
-
Can We Get Along? Dealing with Differences
John Burstein
Learning to tolerate different opinions, perspectives, and beliefs is vital to a healthy society. Slim Goodbody's Can't We Get Along? helps students understand the need and importance for tolerance, and the steps they can take to increase peace in their lives and in the world.
-
Celebrating Families
Rosemarie Hausherr
Presents brief descriptions of many different kinds of families, both traditional and non-traditional.
-
Clara Hale: Mother to Those Who Needed One
Bob Italia
Presents the life of the New York woman whose love of children led her to establish a foster care program to help babies born addicted to drugs.
-
Compromised
Heidi Ayarbe
With her con-man father in prison, fifteen-year-old Maya sets out from Reno, Nevada, for Boise, Idaho, hoping to stay out of foster care by finding an aunt she never knew existed, but a fellow runaway complicates all of her scientifically-devised plans.
-
Coping as a Foster Child
Geraldine M. Blomquist and Paul B. Blomquist
A discussion of ways to make living with foster parents and living in a foster home a better experience.
-
Dear Yvette (Throwback Diaries)
Ni-Ni Simone
After a street fights ends with a jail sentence, Yvette is forced to live far from anything and anyone she's ever known, but starting her life over again may show her what it means to have a real family.
-
Dirt
Denise Orenstein
Eleven-year-old Yonder stopped talking when her mother died, and she stopped going to school because of the bullies, knowing that her father would never even notice (although the social worker did); indeed the only creature that seems to care about her is the one-eyed Shetland pony called Dirt who lives on the neighboring farm--so when she discovers that Dirt is about to be sold for horsemeat she is determined to find a way to save him.
-
Don't Turn Around
Michelle Gagnon
After waking up on an operating table with no memory of how she got there, Noa must team up with computer hacker Peter to stop a corrupt corporation with a deadly secret.
-
Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Wayward Children #2)
Seanan McGuire
In Down Among the Sticks and Bones, twin girls Jack and Jill find themselves thrust into a world of monsters and mad scientists, and something they thought they'd never experience: choice.
-
Dream of Night
Heather Henson
Told from their different points of view, twelve-year-old Shiloh, a troubled foster child, Dream of Night, an abused former racehorse, and Jess, a woman who cares for both, find healing by helping one another through their pain.