Catalog Search Results
1) Hope's boy
Author
Language
English
Description
Relates the author's harrowing family circumstances that led to his placement in the equally daunting foster-care system, and describes how he beat the odds through high academic achievement.
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.4 - AR Pts: 12
Lexile measure
810L
Language
English
Formats
Description
Ashley spent nine years in foster care after being taken away from her mother. She endured many caseworkers, moving from school to school and manipulative, humiliating and abusive treatment from one foster family. See how she survives and eventually thrives against the odds.
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.9 - AR Pts: 9
Lexile measure
1130L
Language
English
Formats
Description
Dave Pelzer, victim of one of the worst child abuse cases in California history, tells the story of his adolescent years after he was removed from his home and placed in foster care, and discusses the influence on his life of Dan Brazell, the man he came to regard as his father.
Author
Language
English
Description
"A brilliant, funny, generation-defining memoir about the double bind of crafting perfect adversity narratives for highly selective institutions, while fumbling through the far murkier reality of actual life in foster care and inpatient mental health treatment. As a child, Emi Nietfeld was caught between a hoarder mother who got her put on antipsychotic medication, but was also the only person to believe she was exceptional, and a state system exemplified...
Author
Language
English
Description
"They were five kids with five different fathers and an alcoholic mother who left them to fend for themselves for weeks at a time. Yet through it all they had each other. Rosie, the youngest, is fawned over and shielded by her older sister, Regina. Their mother, Cookie, blows in and out of their lives 'like a hurricane, blind and uncaring to everything in her path'. But when Regina discloses the truth about her abusive mother to her social worker,...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.5 - AR Pts: 4
Lexile measure
840L
Language
English
Description
...this writing thing was some kind of magic trick I didn't yet understand... Nikki Grimes discovered the power of writing at the tender age of six, when, alone in her room, she poured her fears, anger, and tears onto a piece of paper - and felt sweet relief. Words and faith were her most enduring companions as life flung her headlong from one harrowing experience to the next through her childhood and teenage years. Words, spilled into notebook after...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Taken from his mother at age three, Steve Klakowicz lives a terrifying existence. Caught in the clutches of a cruel foster family and subjected to constant abuse, Steve finds his only refuge in a box of books given to him by a kind stranger. In these books, he discovers new worlds he can only imagine and begins to hope that one day he might have a different life-that one day he will find his true home.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
The startling and ultimately uplifting narrative of one woman's thirteen-year experience as a foster parent.
For more than a decade, Kathy Harrison has sheltered a shifting cast of troubled youngsters-the offspring of prostitutes and addicts; the sons and daughters of abusers; and teenage parents who aren't equipped for parenthood. All this, in addition to raising her three biological sons and two adopted daughters. What would motivate someone to...
Author
Language
English
Description
"In the tradition of The Promise of a Pencil and Kisses from Katie comes an inspirational memoir by the founder of Comfort Cases about his turbulent childhood in the foster care system and the countless obstacles and discrimination he endured in adopting his four children"--
Now happily married to his partner and the father of four beautiful children, Scheer is the founder of an organization that makes life better for thousands of children in the...
10) Etched in sand: a true story of five siblings who survived an unspeakable childhood on Long Island
Author
Language
English
Description
Calcaterra and her siblings endured a series of foster homes and intermittent homelessness in the shadow of the Hamptons. She managed to rise above her past while fighting to keep her brother and three sisters together. An unforgettable reminder that, regardless of social status, the American dream is still within reach for those who have the desire and the determination to succeed.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
This powerful and haunting memoir details the years Paula McLain and her two sisters spent as foster children after being abandoned by both parents in California in the early 1970s. As wards of the State, the sisters spent the next fourteen years moving from foster home to foster home. The dislocations, confusions, and odd pleasures of an unrooted life form the basis of one of the most compelling memoirs in recent years-a book in the tradition of...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Shenandoah Chefalo is on a wholly dysfunctional journey through a childhood with neglectful, drug-and alcohol addicted parents. She endures numerous moves in the middle of the night with just minutes to pack, multiple changes in schools, hunger, cruelty, and loneliness. Finally at the age of thirteen, Shen had had enough. After being abandoned by her mother for months at her grandmother's retirement community, she asks to be put into foster care....
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
Language
English
Formats
Description
"As a child, David Ambroz was raised homeless in New York City, the home of Wall Street and more than 100,000 homeless children. For David and his two siblings, their mother's diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia sets them in motion for a life of poverty,violence and instability as they travel across New York and New England seeking shelter. For eleven years, home for David means living in train stations, subway cars, 24-hour diners, and wherever is...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
From the Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author of 'Damaged' comes the poignant and shocking memoir of Cathy's recent relationship with Tayo, a young boy she fosters whose good behavior and polite manners hide a terrible past. Tayo arrives at Cathy's with only the clothes he stands up in. He has been brought to her by the police, but he is calm, polite, and very well spoken, and not at all like the children she normally fosters. The social...
15) Billy's story
Author
Series
Thrown away children volume 6
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Louise has trouble on her hands from the moment that five-year-old Billy Blackthorn enters her home. He is one of more than 20 children taken into care from a single family, and erupts into her household with a volatility that alarms even this seasoned foster carer. His behaviour is erratic and disturbing, and leads Louise to question the origins of this child's deep trauma. It is only as Billy's harrowing past is revealed that she begins to grasp...
16) Abby's story
Author
Series
Thrown away children volume 2
Language
English
Formats
Description
Foster mother Louise Allen tells the story of the six-year-old child brought to her home with symptoms of fetal alcohol syndrome. How can that young girl unleash such a whirlwind of emotional and physical devastation? Louise is about to find out, and to unwittingly discover the darkness of incest, rejection and abuse in Abby's past.-- From statement at Amazon.com.
17) Jacob's story
Author
Series
Thrown away children volume 4
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Curled up in the dog basket amidst the mud and faecal matter that caked the kitchen floor, was not another farm pet. It was a human child, perhaps four or five years of age, sleeping. Officers from the RSPCA investigated reports of animal cruelty and neglect on a farm, only to discover a young boy curled up asleep in a dog bed, amidst filth and squalor. He has severe physical and cognitive impairments, and no one outside the family seems to know...
18) Eden's story
Author
Series
Thrown away children volume 3
Language
English
Formats
Description
Ashley is a young single mum raising her daughter, Eden, and working hard to do the very best job she can - until one night she can't find a babysitter and makes the decision to leave Eden home alone for a couple of hours, asleep inside a wardrobe. It is an action that begins a terrible downward spiral for both of them. When Eden arrives at experienced foster carer Louise Allen's home, she has entered the care system because her mother is in prison....
19) Stella's story
Author
Series
Thrown away children volume 1
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Stella is just like a tiny bird. This is my first impression of her. A quiet little sparrow of a girl." In her brand new series 'Thrown Away Children', Louise Allen shares the harrowing stories she is exposed to as a foster mother. The first in the series, Stella's Story, tells the astonishing true story of a young girl scarred by an abusive past. Named after the lager that christened her at birth, Stella's life is characterised instability and neglect....
20) Sky's story
Author
Series
Thrown away children volume 5
Language
English
Formats
Description
"When Sky and her older sister Avril were taken into care, the social workers knew this was a case like no other. Raised by unhinged parents who hoarded compulsively, creating horrific conditions no child should live in, the two girls arrived at foster carer Louise's home, neglected, malnourished and indoctrinated. Louise had to draw on all of her experience as one of Britain's leading foster carers to rehabilitate and change the course of their...
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