Lost In Care

Jimmy Holland was born into a family suffering at the hands of their drunk and abusive father. At the age of just two weeks, he was placed into care, and the beginning of a life lived in a constantly changing environment of homes, authorities, and institutions began. Let down and frequently abused, it wasn't long before Jimmy strayed onto the wrong side of the tracks. Before long, the mold for a problem child was set. He quickly turned from substance abuse to drug use, and in turn, to crime. He soon became associated with the ringleaders of an infamous gang responsible for prison riots and hostage taking. A heart-felt, shocking, and despairing insight into life as a state-raised boy, Lost in Care is the heart-rending tale of a man who has lost his childhood and also lost his way.

Jimmy Holland was born into a family suffering at the hands of their drunk and abusive father. At the age of just two weeks, he was placed into care. The beginning of a life lived in a constantly changing environment of homes, authorities and institutions began. Let down and frequently abused, it wasn't long before Jimmy strayed onto the wrong side of the tracks. Before long, the mould for a problem child was set. He quickly turned from substance abuse to drug use and, in turn, to crime - his only means of an escape. An inevitable lifetime of crime faced him and he soon became associated with the ringleaders of an infamous gang responsible for prison riots and hostage taking. A heart-felt, shocking and despairing insight into life as a state-raised boy, Lost in Care is the heart-rending tale of a man who has lost his childhood and also lost his way.

IIn 1973, a young ACLU attorney filed a controversial class-action lawsuit that challenged New York City’s operation of its foster-care system. The plaintiff was an abused runaway named Shirley Wilder who had suffered from the system’s inequities. Wilder, as the case came to be known, was waged for two and a half decades, becoming a battleground for the conflicts of race, religion, and politics that shape America’s child-welfare system. The Lost Children of Wilder gives us the galvanizing history of this landmark case and the personal story at its core. Nina Bernstein takes us behind the scenes of far-reaching legal and legislative battles, but she also traces the life of Shirley Wilder and her son, Lamont, born when Shirley was only fourteen and relinquished to the very system being challenged in her name. Bernstein’s account of Shirley and Lamont’s struggles captures the heartbreaking consequences of the child welfare system’s best intentions and deepest flaws. In the tradition of There Are No Children Here, this is a major achievement of investigative journalism and a tour de force of social observation, a gripping book that will haunt every reader who cares about the needs of children.

[Siren Everlasting Classic ManLove: Erotic Romance, Alternative, Paranormal, Shape-shifter, Vampires/Werewolves, MM, HEA] Dean is the alpha of his pack, the protector and provider for his mate and family. But the enemy has been slipping through his fingers as of late, and when his mate, Adam, makes his plans known that he wants to get a job at a local store, Dean's alpha pride cannot take the hit, especially after his brother-in-law gets hurt at his own job. Adam knows Dean tries so hard. He knows Dean has a lot on his plate, and his decision to get a job has nothing to do with that. He's not trying to hurt or insult his mate, but it seems that even an alpha needs reassurance from time to time, to prove to his mate that Adam's need to work has nothing to do with Dean, and Dean is still a capable warrior and provider regardless of Adam's decision. Marcy Jacks is a Siren-exclusive author.

In 1983, the BC provincial government announced plans to close Tranquille, a large residential institution for persons with intellectual disabilities located outside Kamloops. The announcement was made with no community placement plans for residents. The nearly six hundred employees of Tranquille, members of the BC Government Employees Union and the Union of Psychiatric Nurses, were alarmed by the lack of any Ministry of Human Resources planning for the future of the residents and the ministry’s stated intention to use newly tabled legislation to terminate Tranquille employees without cause and avoid any other collective agreement obligations to employees. Consequently, BCGEU members decided to sit-in and occupy the institution by expelling management, running the institution themselves and publicly advocating for quality community care for people with intellectual disabilities. They did so for nearly a month. Tranquility Lost chronicles the political and public policy conditions leading up to the occupation, the day-to-day activities of the occupation itself, the challenges faced by the workers and negotiations leading to an agreement. Steeves’s account profiles the courage of Tranquille employees and their unprecedented use of collective bargaining as a tool to address conditions faced by government clients as well as government employees themselves.

In the early 1970s, a new wave of public service announcements urged parents to "help end an American tradition" of child abuse. The message, relayed repeatedly over television and radio, urged abusive parents to seek help. Support groups for parents, including Parents Anonymous, proliferated across the country to deal with the seemingly burgeoning crisis. At the same time, an ever-increasing number of abused children were reported to child welfare agencies, due in part to an expansion of mandatory reporting laws and the creation of reporting hotlines across the nation. Here, Mical Raz examines this history of child abuse policy and charts how it changed since the late 1960s, specifically taking into account the frequency with which agencies removed African American children from their homes and placed them in foster care. Highlighting the rise of Parents Anonymous and connecting their activism to the sexual abuse moral panic that swept the country in the 1980s, Raz argues that these panics and policies—as well as biased viewpoints regarding race, class, and gender—played a powerful role shaping perceptions of child abuse. These perceptions were often directly at odds with the available data and disproportionately targeted poor African American families above others.

An international bestseller and one of The Times’ “Top 50 Novels Published in the 21st Century,” Claire Keegan’s piercing contemporary classic Foster is a heartbreaking story of childhood, loss, and love; now released as a standalone book for the first time ever in the US It is a hot summer in rural Ireland. A child is taken by her father to live with relatives on a farm, not knowing when or if she will be brought home again. In the Kinsellas’ house, she finds an affection and warmth she has not known and slowly, in their care, begins to blossom. But there is something unspoken in this new household—where everything is so well tended to—and this summer must soon come to an end. Winner of the prestigious Davy Byrnes Award and published in an abridged version in the New Yorker, this internationally bestselling contemporary classic is now available for the first time in the US in a full, standalone edition. A story of astonishing emotional depth, Foster showcases Claire Keegan’s great talent and secures her reputation as one of our most important storytellers.