"Forced into retirement, Evan Smoak gets an urgent request for help from someone he didn't even suspect existed--in Prodigal Son, the next New York Times bestselling Orphan X book from Gregg Hurwitz. As a boy, Evan Smoak was pulled out of a foster home and trained in an off-the-books operation known as the Orphan Program. He was a government assassin, perhaps the best, known to a few insiders as Orphan X. He eventually broke with the Program and adopted...

Publisher Annotation: 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. 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...

Ask us who we are is a documentary film focused on the challenges and extraordinary lives of youth in foster care. Although the film highlights the heartbreak that many foster care youth carry with them as they move through their lives, the documentary also reveals the tremendous strength and perseverance that grows out of their determination to survive and thrive. The documentary also focuses on the lives of foster care parents and kinship families...

[This book] is [an] account of one of the most severe child abuse cases in California history. It is the story of Dave Pelzer, who was brutally beaten and starved by his emotionally unstable, alcoholic mother: a mother who played torturous, unpredictable games - games that left him nearly dead. He had to learn how to play his mother's games in order to survive because she no longer considered him a son, but a slave; and no longer a boy, but an "it."...

When a lost dog helps Laura find a way home to her family, they discover family in each other along the way.

"Katherine Parker is on the cusp of having everything she ever wanted - fame, money, and acclaim. So why isn't she happy? In search of answers, she comes incognito to Hope Harbor on the Oregon coast for some R&R. Maybe in her secluded rental house overlooking the serene Pacific she'll be able to calm the storm inside. Coffee shop owner Zach Garrett has found his niche after a traumatic loss - and he has no plans to change the life he's created. Nor...

Winner of an Academy Award in the Documentary Short category, Big Mama depicts a devoted grandmother's struggle to raise her orphaned grandson under the watchful eye of a complex and difficult social welfare system. Big Mama follows 18 months in the lives of Viola Dees, an African American grandmother, and Walter, her grandson, as she tries to raise him alone in South Central Los Angeles. Dees has taken care of Walter since the age of four, when his...

Baby, 13 and motherless, is young enough to drag her dolls around in a vinyl suitcase and old enough to know more than she should about life on the streets. She lives with her father Jules, who has a penchant for heroin. To survive, Baby spins stories, cracks herself up, and slips through life. Her beauty captures the attention of Alphonse, and his stable of young girls. Jules sends her to reform school, but Baby finds a way out and into the hands...

"Ellis and Easton have been inseparable since childhood. But when a rash decision throws Ellis's life--and her relationship with Easton-- into chaos she's forced to move halfway across the country, far from everything she's ever known. Now Ellis hasn't spoken to Easton in a year, and maybe it's better that way; maybe eventually the Easton shaped hole in her heart will heal. But when Easton's mother invites her home for a celebration, Ellis finds herself...

On March 26, 2018, rescue workers discovered a crumpled SUV and the bodies of two women and several children at the bottom of a cliff beside 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 the six Black children from two different Texas families in 2006 and 2008. Behind the family's loving...