FernFolio » foster families

Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians by Brandon Sanderson

fernfolio — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 18:07:50 +0000

What if you suddenly discovered that everything you’d been told about history, geography, science, yourself, was a lie? What if you learned that, in fact, there aren’t seven continents but ten, and that those three extra continents form what remains of the Free Kingdoms, where Oculators battle valiantly against the encroaching forces of evil, protected by the Knights of Crystallia? What if it was revealed to you that librarians control seven tenths of the world, and are doing their evil best to conquer the rest?
On his thirteenth birthday Alcatraz Smedry receives a package from his father containing his promised inheritance. This comes as a surprise to Alcatraz because he’s lived in foster homes for as long as he can remember, and the package is filled with sand. That same day, he manages to set his foster parents’ kitchen on fire, and they conclude, after eight months of trying, that they are not the right family for the accident-prone teen. When his case worker, the unpleasant Ms. Fletcher, shows up to scold him for his destructiveness and warn him that she’s running out of options for him, Alcatraz prepares himself for yet another move, but, when the foster care case worker shows up, he pulls a gun on the kid and tries to kill him. Fortunately, Alcatraz’ destructiveness seems to spread to the man’s gun, and it breaks, allowing the boy to escape right into the arms of a strange old man wearing odd-looking glasses and a tuxedo jacket who claims to be his grandfather. Caught between a killer and a crazy, Alcatraz decides to go with the old man, and ends up involved in a battle to save the Sands of Rashid from the librarians and their leader, the Dark Oculator.
Along with Grandpa Smedry, his cousin Sing, a rather confusing man, named Quentin, and Bastille, an unpleasant young knight charged with protecting his grandfather, Alcatraz infiltrates the city’s Central Library, a building whose innocent-looking exterior hides a massive and labyrinthine series of floors crowded with rooms filled with books and dinosaurs and special glasses. He discovers that the destructiveness that plagues him is actually a powerful Talent, one that he is going to have to learn to accurately use and fast, if he’s going to help his newly-found family prevent the Free Kingdoms from falling to the librarians and becoming part of the Hushlands. He also learns that he is an Oculator, one of the rare people who can use the pairs of glasses specially crafted as tools, and weapons, by both Free Kingdomers and librarians.
Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians is a rollicking adventure filled with surprises, one that is sure to captivate the imagination. Just as interesting are Alcatraz’ discoveries about himself, and his frequent asides about literature and the art of writing. To the end, the writer claims that the book is fact, not fiction, but, really, evil librarians plotting to take over the world? Fantasy, and nothing more!
FernFolio Editor

Breakout by Paul Fleischman

fernfolio — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 20:58:25 +0000

Early one July morning, a seventeen-year old girl named Del Thigpin sneaks out of the home of her foster parents, and down the street to where she has parked her 1983 Datsun, purchased secretly with the money she’s earned working at a video store. After staging her own death from drowning at a nearby beach, she begins her journey into a new life as Elena Franco.
With a six-month supply of food, camping gear, and 134 dollars, Del plans to drive to Arizona, camp near a small town, and get a job to support herself. Though frightened, at times, by her complete lack of family or friends, and uncertain about the future, Del is determined to leave behind the endless foster homes and social workers, and the cynical, mouthy and defensive young woman she has become to survive the circumstances of her life. Adapting regularly to new foster parents and siblings, and new schools, has taught Del to keep her thoughts to herself, lie with creativity, and become whoever she needs to be in order to get by. It has also made her a reader, and a lover of old movies, especially French and Italian films, and she has cobbled together a convincing set of stories about her part Italian family from her reading and viewing. Del is also an observer of others, and has learned to mimic the behaviours of those around her as a way of entering into, in effect, borrowing, their lives.
On that July day, Del plans to get as far from Los Angeles as she can before her foster mother reports her missing, but a serious collision on the Santa Monica freeway stops traffic for hours, and she, and all of her fellow travellers, find themselves stranded in their vehicles.
Breakout is the story of that traffic jam, and what happens to Del and the others stuck on the freeway that day. It is also the script for Elena Franco’s one-woman show about a day-long traffic jam on the San Diego freeway, that opens in Denver eight years after Del stages her escape from L.A. Written by Paul Fleischman, it explores people’s obsession with running away from themselves and what happens when, for one day, they are forced to stop and confront that face in the rear-view mirror. Fleischman’s insights into the human psyche, as represented first and foremost by Del and her alter ego Elena, are both tender and searing.
FernFolio Editor

Never to be Told by Becky Citra

fernfolio — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 00:21:27 +0000

Twelve year-old Asia has lived with Ira and Maggy on their farm at Cold Creek for as long as she can remember. Abandoned by her mother at age three, she has found everything she needs in the elderly couple, their small house heated by its wood stove, and the fields of hay and sheep and cows. She loves helping Ira finish the beautiful wooden boxes he makes to sell at craft fairs and in gift shops, working with Maggie in her flower and vegetable garden, and climbing high in her old pine tree by the creek. She never thinks about the young mother who brought her to Cold Creek and then drove away one day, several months later, promising to return for her.
When Ira suffers a heartache and is hospitalized, Maggie and Ira’s son Harry comes home from California to help his parents. He tries to encourage his parents to return with him to California, where the warm climate will be easier on Ira’s heart and Maggie’s arthritis. Since he lives with his wife in an adults-only condominium, he begins to make alternative arrangements for Asia. Since they never tried to get legal custody of Asia, afraid that children’s aid would turn them down as suitable foster parents because of their age, Ira and Maggie have no rights with regard to the girl, and Asia quickly finds herself poised to lose the only home and family she has ever known.
But Asia is not the only one suffering the loss of everything she holds dear. Close to Ira and Maggie’s farm lies the abandoned ruin of a second farmhouse, the old Williams place. It is haunted by the ghost of Miranda Williams, a young wife and mother whose daughter, Daisy, died suddenly at the age of three, leaving Miranda bereft. Miranda’s ghost recalls the arrival at the Williams farm, nearly a hundred years before, of a man looking for work and accompanied by his young daughter, Beatrice. Miranda’s preoccupation with the child grows to be point of obsession and leads, eventually, to tragedy, one that has tied her ghost to the abandoned farm for over forty years.
The ghost of Miranda Williams reaches out to Asia, and asks for her help in locating something that has been lost for decades, something that will reveal a terrible secret and set her free. In aiding the ghost, Asia draws closer to her maternal grandmother, Beth, with whom she has gone to live, and finds within herself the courage to accept the changes that life has brought her.
Never to be Told is one of the novels nominated for the 2008 Silver Birch prize.
FernFolio Editor

Jakeman by Deborah Ellis

fernfolio — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 18:13:54 +0000

Eleven year-old Jacob Tyronne DeShawn’s mother is in prison serving a lengthy sentence, and he and his sixteen year-old sister Shoshona travel ten hours four times a year to visit her. Accompanied by Ms. Granite, a social worker, a rag-tag collection of children and adolescents boards an old school bus after midnight on the Friday of the Mother’s Day weekend for the long journey to Wickham Correctional Institute for Women.
While Jake and Shoshona have made the trip many times before, for some of the children on the bus, this is their first experience with the long waits, the invasive searches, and the barbed wire fences, as well as the harsh and uncompromising attitudes of prison staff. These children whose mothers are in prison know a great deal about poverty and abandonment, the foster care system, and prejudice, and they have all found ways to cope with the loss of their mothers. Shoshona is always in control, and is focussed on doing well in school so that she can become a singer. Jake retreats into the world of Jakeman, the comic book hero he has created in the pages of his notebook. Carolyn has stopped talking. Harlan is always angry.
The prison visits prove difficult. Jake fears his mother won’t recognize him, Shoshona is taken to task for not looking after her younger brother better, and both are blamed for their mother’s troubles – if only they hadn’t always been asking for things. Harlan, still grieving for his mother after her death in prison from appendicitis, confronts the prison warden and is immediately escorted from the prison.
On the way home, Ms. Granite and many of the children become ill from food poisoning and are hospitalized. Left in the care of a nasty bus driver who makes no secret of his dislike for them, Jake and Shoshona and a small group of children start the long trip back to the city. But, when Shoshona realizes that the driver is drunk, the kids on the bus stage a revolt. After leaving the driver lying at the side of the road, they take off to discover if they really are just the sum of everything that is written in their children’s aid files or if, just possibly, they might be a whole lot more.
Written by the wonderful Deborah Ellis, Jakeman is a tough, funny and tender story about the young and unintended victims of the justice system.
FernFolio Editor

Skinny Bones and the Wrinkle Queen by Glen Huser

fernfolio — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 01:00:16 +0000

Fifteen year-old Tamura Tierney is determined to become a model. Obsessed with fashion, make up, hair and clothes, she’s not going to let the fact that she’s living in her third foster home, with the kind but style-challenged Shirl and Herb stop her from fulfilling her dreams.
Eighty-nine year old Miss Jean Barclay, may be living in the Sierra Sunset Seniors’ Lodge following a hip and knee replacement, but she’s still as sharp as a tack, most days, and hates the saccharine attitude of staff at the Triple S Ranch, as she calls it. After a lifetime of teaching English to Grade 7 and 8, the old lady has no illusions about adolescents and so, when she is paired with Tamura during a student-senior exchange, she sees through the young girl’s polite responses and rejects her gift of purple knitted slippers as the ugliest things she’s ever seen. Since her teacher has come up with the gift, Tamura can’t help but agree, and so two rather prickly individuals form a tentative bond.
When Tamura comes across a brochure for a modelling course, one that promises to launch her into a modelling career, she decides to ask Miss Barclay, the Wrinkle Queen, to loan her the $2,500 dollar fee. Miss Barclay, refuses, initially, but then decides that Skinny Bones could help her realize her dream of attending Wagner’s Ring Cycle in Seattle. A lifelong opera lover, the elderly lady wants to experience the thrill of her favourite operas one more time before she dies.
Skinny Bones and the Wrinkle Queen plan an elaborate subterfuge that involves lying to the Seniors’ residence and Miss Barclay’s nephew, Byron, as well as to Tamura’s social worker and foster parents, then take off on a road trip to Seattle for a week of opera and then to Vancouver for Tamura’s modelling course. Co-operating to realize their separate dreams, the young girl and the elderly former teacher are drawn together and, despite themselves, changed by their friendship.
Told in the first person, by Tamura and Miss Barclay, this book is a warm and wry look at the follies and aspirations of two strong characters who strive against tall odds to make their dreams come true. Another wonderful book by Glen Huser.
FernFolio Editor

Dancing Through the Snow by Jean Little

fernfolio — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 01:17:42 +0000

It’s snowing and Christmas is just around the corner, but eleven year-old Min Randall is not looking forward to the celebration. She hates Christmas because it only serves to remind her that she doesn’t have a family of her own. When her foster mother abruptly packs up her things and delivers her back to her Children’s Aid caseworker’s office, Min braces herself for the inevitable discussion about what has gone wrong, and her innumerable faults. Time and again, Min is returned to Children’s Aid by foster parents who find her cold, heartless, sullen, sly.
Then Dr. Jess Hart, whom Min knows from a stay in hospital, arrives to overhear the discussion between Min’s foster mother and her caseworker, and, furious at them both, announces that she’s taking Min home. Jess is herself a product of the foster care system, and, unlike Min’s previous foster parents, she doesn’t expect Min to be other than she is.
Min meets Toby, Jess’ twelve year-old godson, and, despite her initial reluctance, learns to like him. She finds a little half-starved, abused dog, whose experiences in life seem to mirror her own. She meets and makes friends with Penny, her first friend ever. She slowly discovers that she can trust Jess not to grow tired of her and abandon her.
Dancing Through the Snow is a story about the importance of trust and honesty and patience and love, and about how some of the best families are made and not born.
FernFolio Editor