Foster Care

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Just Like a Mama by Alice Faye Duncan (hardcover)
Just Like a Mama by Alice Faye Duncan (hardcover)

Celebrate the heart connection between adopted children and the forever families who welcome them with kindness, care, and unconditional love in this powerful picture book from the author of Honey Baby Sugar Child.

Carol Olivia Clementine lives with Mama Rose. Mama Rose is everything—tender and sweet. She is also as stern and demanding as any good parent should be. In the midst of their happy home, Carol misses her mother and father. She longs to be with them. But until that time comes around, she learns to surrender to the love that is present. Mama Rose becomes her “home.” And Carol Olivia Clementine concludes that she loves Miss Rose, “just like a mama.”


This sweet read-aloud is, on the surface, all about the everyday home life a caregiver creates for a young child: she teachers Clementine how to ride a bike, clean her room, tell time. A deeper look reveals the patience, intention, and care little ones receives in the arms of a mother whose blood is not her blood, but whose bond is so deep—and so unconditional—that it creates the most perfect condition for a child to feel safe, successful, and deeply loved.

Appropriate for ages 4 to 8.

$17.99
We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America by Roxana Asgarian (hardcover)
We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America by Roxana Asgarian (hardcover)

“A riveting indictment of the child welfare system . . . [A] bracing gut punch of a book.” Robert Kolker, The Washington Post

“[A] moving and superbly reported book.” Jessica Winter, The New Yorker

“A harrowing account . . . [and] a powerful critique of [the] foster care system . . . We Were Once a Family is a wrenching book.” Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

The shocking, deeply reported story of a murder-suicide that claimed the lives of six childrenand a searing indictment of the American foster care system.

On March 26, 2018, rescue workers discovered a crumpled SUV and the bodies of two women and multiple children at the bottom of a cliff along the Pacific Coast Highway. Investigators soon concluded that the crash was a murder-suicide, but there was more to the story: Jennifer and Sarah Hart, it turned out, were a white married couple who had adopted six Black children from two different Texas families in 2006 and 2008. Behind the family’s loving facade was an alleged pattern of abuse and neglect that had been ignored as the couple withdrew the children from school and moved west. It soon became apparent that the State of Texas knew all too little about the two individuals to whom it had given custody of six children. 

Immersive journalism of the highest order, Roxanna Asgarian’s We Were Once a Family is a revelation of precarious lives; it is also a shattering exposé of the foster care and adoption systems that produced this tragedy. As a journalist in Houston, Asgarian sought out the children’s birth families and put them at the center of the story. We follow the lives of the Harts’ adopted children and their birth parents, and the machinations of the state agency that sent the children far away. Asgarian’s reporting uncovers persistent racial biases and corruption as young people of color are separated from birth parents without proper cause. The result is a riveting narrative and a deeply reported indictment of a system that continues to fail America’s most vulnerable children while upending the lives of their families.

Original price was: $25.00.Current price is: $5.00.
You Should Be Grateful: Stories of Race, Identity, and Transracial Adoption by Angela Tucker (paperback)
You Should Be Grateful: Stories of Race, Identity, and Transracial Adoption by Angela Tucker (paperback)

An adoption expert and transracial adoptee herself examines the unique perspectives and challenges these adoptees have as they navigate multiple cultures.

“Your parents are so amazing for adopting you! You should be grateful that you were adopted.”

Angela Tucker is a Black woman, adopted from foster care by white parents. She has heard this microaggression her entire life, usually from well-intentioned strangers who view her adoptive parents as noble saviors. She is grateful for many aspects of her life, but being transracially adopted involves layers of rejection, loss, and complexity that cannot be summed up so easily.

In “You Should Be Grateful,” Tucker centers the experiences of adoptees to share deeply personal stories, well-researched history, and engrossing anecdotes from mentorship sessions with adopted youth. These perspectives challenge the fairy-tale narrative of adoption, giving way to a fuller story that explores the impacts of racism, classism, family, love, and belonging.

$18.00