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:
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Runaway!
Janet Willig
After leaving home because her drunken father frequently beats her, fourteen-year-old Jodie tries out a couple of foster homes and eventually finds peace with a loving Christian family.
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Runaway Twin
Peg Kehret
Thirteen-year-old Sunny, accompanied by a stray dog, takes advantage of a windfall to travel from her Nebraska foster home to Enumclaw, Washington, to find the twin sister from whom she was separated at age three.
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Singing Tree and Laughing Water
Sylvia Hardwick
Relates the adventures of two Native American sisters after they go to live with a foster mother.
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SkateFate
Juan Felipe Herrera
Lucky Z, a Chicano foster child, loved living on the edge until a drag racing accident left him in a wheelchair, but as he struggles to find his place in a new high school, he begins writing poetry everywhere about anything, and in finding his voice he also discovers the beauty around him.
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Sputnik's Guide to Life on Earth
Frank Cottrell Boyce
Prez knows that the best way to keep track of things is to make a list. That's important when you have a grandfather who is constantly forgetting. And it's even more important when your grandfather can't care for you anymore and you have to go live with a foster family out in the country. Prez is still learning to fit in at his new home when he answers the door to meet Sputnik—a kid who is more than a little strange. First, he can hear what Prez is thinking. Second, he looks like a dog to everyone except Prez. Third, he can manipulate the laws of space and time. Sputnik, it turns out is an alien, and he's got a mission that requires Prez's help: the Earth has been marked for destruction, and the only way they can stop it is to come up with ten reasons why the planet should be saved. Thus begins one of the most fun and eventful summers of Prez's life, as he and Sputnik set out on a journey to compile the most important list Prez has ever made—and discover just what makes our world so remarkable.
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Stellaluna
Janell Cannon
After she falls headfirst into a bird's nest, a baby bat is raised like a bird until she is reunited with her mother.
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Stick Boy
Joan T. Zeier
When a seven-inch growth spurt in the sixth grade makes skinny, self-conscious Eric a school misfit and the victim of the class bully, he is led to befriend Cynthia, a proud and spirited black girl who is disabled.
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The Ballad of Knuckles McGraw
Lois J. Peterson
After Kevin's mother abandons him, he takes refuge in his fantasy of becoming a cowboy, but his reality is a foster home and grandparents he doesn't know.
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The Blending of Foster and Adopted Children into a Family
Heather Lehr Wagner and Marvin Rosen
Explores issues facing families confronting the challenges created by adoption and foster care, and identifies steps members of blended families can take to ensure that they have a strong foundation.
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The Cottage in the Woods
Katherine Coville
Presents the story of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" as told by young Teddy's governess, who came to work at the Vaughn family "cottage" shortly before a golden-haired girl, ragged and dirty, entered the home and soon became a beloved foster child, until evil characters tried to take her away.
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The Foster Care System
Joyce Libal
If your parents were unable to care for you, where would you go? Do you have family or friends who would take you in and support you? Unfortunately, many children don't have this option. The foster care system was put in place to help young people who find themselves without homes. As you follow the story of Bobby and Cara, two children whose family was torn apart, you'll discover more about the foster care system.
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The Great Big Book of Families
Mary Hoffman
Features illustrations and descriptions of different types of families and how their lives are similar and different.
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The Great Gilly Hopkins
Katherine Paterson
Watch out world! The Great Gilly Hopkins is looking for a home. She's a foster kid who's been angry, lonely, and hurting for so long that's she's always ready for a fight. Be on the lookout for her best barracuda smile, the one she saves for well-meaning social workers. Watch out for her most fearful look, a cross between Dracula and Godzilla, used especially to scare shy foster brothers.
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The Mailbox
Audrey Shafer
When twelve-year-old Gabe tries to hide his uncle's death from the local authorities, he is not prepared for what happens when this secret is discovered.
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The Road to Paris
Nikki Grimes
Inconsolable at being separated from her older brother, eight-year-old Paris is apprehensive about her new foster family but just as she learns to trust them, she faces a life-changing decision.
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The Star: A Story to Help Young Children Understand Foster Care
Cynthia Miller Lovell
The Star: A Story to Help Young Children Understand Foster Care is an easy-to-read, short story with beautiful, watercolor illustrations. The book follows a fictional young girl, Kit, who is taken from her mother to the safety, and different world, of a foster home. On Kit's first night in foster care, she becomes friends with a star outside her bedroom window. The star tells Kit about other foster children it has seen. Through the story, the star is a source of comfort for Kit as she experiences many emotions and adjusts to all the new things in her foster home.
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The Visit
S. Latisha Herbert
A description of a visit of a child in foster care with her other siblings in separate foster homes.
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The War That Saved My Life
Kimberly Brubaker Bradley
A young disabled girl and her brother are evacuated from London to the English countryside during World War II, where they find life to be much sweeter away from their abusive mother.
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The Window
Michael Dorris
When ten-year-old Rayona's Native American mother enters a treatment facility, her estranged father, a Black man, finally introduces her to his side of the family, who are not at all what she expected.
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They Never Came Back
Caroline B. Cooney
When fifteen-year-old Cathy decides to carpool from Norwalk to tony Greenwich, Connecticut, to study Latin in summer school, she does not expect the shocking events that occured five years earlier to suddenly come flooding back into her relatively settled life.
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Three Little Words
Sarah N. Harvey
When Sid leaves his foster family on their remote island home in search of the mother he doesn't remember and a brother he's never met, he's ill-prepared for the surprises he finds.
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Three Little Words: A Memoir
Ashley Rhodes-Courter
"Sunshine, you're my baby and I'm your only mother. You must mind the one taking care of you, but she's not your mama." Ashley Rhodes-Courter spent nine years of her life in fourteen different foster homes, living by those words. As her mother spirals out of control, Ashley is left clinging to an unpredictable, dissolving relationship, all the while getting pulled deeper and deeper into the foster care system.
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Three Pennies
Melanie Crowder
In San Francisco, eleven-year-old Marin desperately searches for her birthmother knowing time is running out before she is adopted, and discovers for the first time in her life what it feels like to be truly wanted by someone.
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Tiger's Curse (The Tiger Saga, #1)
Collen Houck
Seventeen-year-old Oregon teenager Kelsey forms a bond with a circus tiger who is actually one of two brothers, Indian princes Ren and Kishan, who were cursed to live as tigers for eternity, and she travels with him to India where the tiger's curse may be broken once and for all.
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Train to Somewhere
Even Bunting
In the late 1800s, Marianne travels westward on the Orphan Train in hopes of being placed with a caring family.