An intimate, authoritative look at the foster care system that examines why it is failing the kids it is supposed to protect and what can be done to change it.

Eleven-year-old December waits to sprout wings and fly away, until a new foster mother changes her perspective on home and family.

When the state of Maine threatens to shut down their island's one-room schoolhouse because of dwindling enrollment, eleven-year-old Tess, a strong believer in luck, and her family take in a trumpet-playing foster child, to increase the school's population.

When her grandfather dies and her grandmother is diagnosed with dementia, fifteen-year-old Lucky must navigate the foster-care system.

Referring to the I-Ching and a trio of good-luck pennies whenever she is bounced to a new foster home, Marin finds herself in a place that feels like a forever home while trying to find her birth mother.

Seventeen-year-old Margaret "Cuckoo" Clark keeps a journal detailing the trials and tribulations of high school life as she and her close-knit group of outcast friends try to break down the barriers between their school's "warring nations."

Since his mother's death, Jayson, twelve, has focused on basketball and surviving but he is found out and placed with an affluent foster family of a different race, and must learn to accept many changes, including facing his former teammates in a championship game.

"Some folks will do anything to control the wild spirit of a Carolina girl... For fourteen-year-old Leah Payne, life in her beloved coastal Carolina town is as simple as it is free. Devoted to her lumberjack father and running through the wilds where the forest meets the shore, Leah's country life is as natural as the Loblolly pines that rise to greet the Southern sky. When an accident takes her father's life, Leah is wrenched from her small community...

Taking a winter trip to bond with his new foster family, Jayden and his siblings Maggie and Connor are forced by a terrible car accident into a bleak storm to search for help and survive the elements.

In a series of poems, eleven-year-old Lonnie writes about his life, after the death of his parents, separated from his younger sister, living in a foster home, and finding his poetic voice at school.