Gilly Hopkins has seen more than her share of foster homes and has outwitted every family she has lived with. In an effort to escape her new foster mother Maime Trotter's endless loving care, Gilly concocts a plan that she believes will bring her mother running to her rescue. But when the ploy blows up in Gilly's face it threatens to ruin the only chance she's ever had to be part of a real family.

Chronicles the author's life and his hope and determination that helped to transform him from a neglected, orphaned toddler to a successful adult.

"During a terrible heat wave in 1991--the worst in a decade--ten-year-old Anton has been locked in an apartment in the projects, alone, for seven days, without air conditioning or a fan. With no electricity, the refrigerator and lights do not work. Hot, hungry, and desperate, Anton shatters a window and climbs out. Cutting his leg on the broken glass, he is covered in blood when the police find him. Juanita, his mother, is discovered in a crack house...

"One man's disappearance throws four women's lives into chaos--and not all will survive. Vicki works as an aromatherapist, healing her clients out of her home studio with her special blends of essential oils. She's just finishing a session when the police arrive on her doorstep--her ex-husband David has gone missing. Vicki insists she last saw him years ago when they divorced, but the police clearly don't believe her. And her memory's hardly reliable--what...

"Jazz and Joaquin's foster mother, Carol, has always been fanatical, but with Jazz grown up and out of the house, Carol takes a dangerous turn that threatens thirteen-year-old Joaquin's life. Over and over, child services fails to intervene, and Joaquin is running out of time. Then Jazz gets a blocked call from someone offering a solution. There are others like her--people the law has failed. They've formed an underground network of 'helpers', each...

Explains why one goes to a foster home, who foster parents are, what to do if things don't work out, and other matters regarding foster care.

Traces the author's painful childhood in a series of foster homes, her deteriorating relationship with her emotionally unstable mother, abuse at the hands of a foster family, and her subsequent efforts to advocate for an improved foster care system.

When two orphans, living with foster parents who don't allow pets, keep secretly caring for their dog discover stray dogs in an abandoned hotel, they fix up the building and get help from their friends to run the new shelter.

The founder of the Heritage Home Foundation nonprofit documents her secret abuse-marked childhood in and out of foster care and what she discovered while investigating the story of her mother's own harrowing past.

While searching for fifteen-year-old Ramona Titus, who has run away from her foster home, Black homicide cop-turned-PI Cass Raines soon discovers that Ramona is holding secrets dark enough to kill for and if Cass can't find her first, she will have nowhere left to run.