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Fiction featuring Care Experience Girl, Woman, Other Bernardine Evaristo 2020 Winner of the Booker Prize 2019. Grace is a Victorian orphan dreaming of the mysterious African father she will never meet. Winsome is a young Windrush bride, recently arrived from Barbados. Amma is the fierce queen of her 1980s squatters' palace. Morgan, who used to be Megan, is blowing up on social media, the newest activist-influencer on the block. Twelve very different people, mostly black and female, more than a hundred years of change, and one sweeping, vibrant, glorious portrait of contemporary Britain. Bernardine Evaristo presents a gloriously new kind of history for this old country- ever-dynamic, ever-expanding and utterly irresistible. Amongst the characters are some who were in 'care'. Dominque's partner of 3 years, Nzinga, was in the American foster care system; Bummi was in kinship care as was Lennox; Grace was in a Girls' Home; and Penelope was adopted. External Website

Films/Videos Enola Holmes 2 ​ 2022 Enola Homles 2 (2022) is another film based on The Enola Holmes Mysteries by American writer Nancy Springer. In the 1st film, Enola Holmes ends up in the kinship care of Mycroft Holmes. In this one, she is a ward of Sherlock Holmes. Enola has started up her own private detective agency, and is about to close it when she is asked by an orphaned girl, Bessie, to find Bessie's sister, Sarah Chapman. Bessie has been living with the older Sarah, but they are not biological sisters. At the centre of the story is a match factory where girls and women are dying because of the phosphorus being used. A strike at the factory is a fictionalised version of an actual 1888 strike by women and girls working at the Bryant & May match factory in Bow, London. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Trapped Amy Witting 1990 Marriages (1990) by Australian writer Amy Witting (1918-2001) is a collection of short stories exploring the idea that marriage isn’t necessarily enough to bring together two people. The final story of the collection is entitled The Trap. Lawyer Bill feels he is trapped in his marriage with his beautiful wife, Ann. What Bill doesn’t realise—not until the end of the story—is that his wife has been deeply affected by her childhood. She told him 3 years ago she was an orphan raised in kinship care, now he knows she was ‘illegimate’. He has seen for himself how Ann’s extended family treat her as if she doesn’t exist, and how they have lied to her about who her mother is for years. A more sympathetic Bill concludes that he might need to spend the rest of his life reassuring Ann that she is not guilty for anything that happened in her childhood and that she doesn’t “have to be the perfect plastic model of the perfect human being.” External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Macbeth Jo Nesbo 2018 Shakespeare’s dark and tragic play retold and set in the 1970s. Jo Nesbo has imagined Macbeth has spending his childhood in an orphanage where he was sexually abused. The character of Duff (originally Macduff) has also been reiminaged by Nesbo as living in an orphanage where he is Macbeth's best friend. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Separate Tracks Jane Rogers 2012 The first novel from the acclaimed author of Mr. Wroe's Virgins and The Voyage Home. Orph is a strange, silent, friendless young man. Emma meets him when she comes to work at the children’s home where he lives. She offers him a room in her student flat. But there, amid the love affairs and politics of university life, Orph’s alienation only grows deeper, and his lonely course has the most desperate of consequences. External Website

Biography of Care Experienced People Just us Gabrielle Carey 1984 Just Us, tells the story of a romance between a prisoner and a journalist. Terry Haley had been in institutions from the time he was 8. Haley was serving a sentence for abduction and rape in 1972 when he escaped from Yatala Prison in South Australia. He was in Parramatta Gaol when Gabrielle Carey, a journalist, met and fell in love with him. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Book Thief (novel) Markus Zusak 2007 Markus Zusak's unforgettable story is about the ability of books to feed the soul. When Death has a story to tell, you listen. It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still. Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement. I External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Cider House Rules (Novel) John Irving 1985 The Cider House Rules (1985) by American writer John Irving is a bildungsroman, a story about Homer Wells who grows up in an orphanage. The orphanage is run by a Dr Wilbur Larch who trains young Homer to become an obstetrician. After Larch’s death, Homer Wells returns to the orphanage to become the new director. Melony also grew up in the orphanage and was Homer’s 1st girlfriend. She becomes an electrician. The Cider House Rules was adapted for film in 1999 and stars Tobey Maguire as Homer Wells and Michael Caine as Wilbur Larch. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Jamaica Inn Daphne Du Maurier et al. 2003 After the death of her mother, Mary Yellan crosses the windswept Cornish moors to Jamaica Inn, the home of her Aunt Patience. There she finds Patience a changed woman, downtrodden by her domineering, vicious husband Joss Merlyn. The inn is a front for a lawless gang of criminals, and Mary is unwillingly dragged into their dangerous world of smuggling and murder. Before long she will be forced to cross her own moral line to save herself... External Website

Children's Fiction Jamberoo Road Eleanor Roberts Spence et al. 1969 Five years ago, in 1825, Missabella and her ten orphans—the “Switherby Pilgrims”—had voyaged from England to New South Wales, in primitive Australia. Missabella, now, is determined to provide for the future of her orphans according to each one’s character. Not an easy task, with such a varied, ragtag, yet lovable set of personalities and backgrounds as they represent. Selina will train in Sydney to be a milliner; Paul may become a midshipman; Francis loves to farm. But what will satisfy clever, independent Cassie, who has ambitions to be a writer? The “Jamberoo Road” leads her inland, to the discomforts and enticements of being governess in a wealthy colonial family. Cassie’s story, interwoven with that of all the other orphans’ and their former farmhand Eben’s, is both an account of personal growth and a vivid journey into early-day Australia. External Website

Films/Videos Christmas Story ​ 2007 Did you know *Father Christmas* was an orphan? Well in 'Christmas Story' (2007 Finnish film) he is! It is the story of how orphan, Nikolas became Santa Claus. In Lapland, they raise him communally. with each family taking him for one year and then moving him on to the next. Grateful, Nikolas makes toys for each family that cared for him and so it grows. It becomes a tradition from then, with Nikolas never forgetting the children of those families that received him each year. When a blight hits the village, and none of the families can afford to take him in for the next year, he is taken in by grumpy hermit Iisakki as his carpenter's apprentice. Iisakki works him hard but Nikolas is clever and quick to learn, and Iisakki gradually grows to love Nikolas as his own son. Nikolas begins to live more and more for the spirit of Christmas with each passing year and it becomes his life and as he grows old he becomes the figure known as Santa Claus. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience How the Dead Speak Val Mcdermid 2019 The next heart-pounding Tony Hill and Carol Jordan thriller from number one bestseller and queen of crime, Val McDermid. The story includes the death and illegal burial of 40 girls living in a convent home, and serial killer is a Care Experienced Person. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Donor Helen Fitzgerald 2011 Care Experienced people are crucial to the plot in The Donor (2011). Mum, who was in foster care, leaves her husband and twin daughters when the girls are three. She doesn’t re-enter their lives for 13 years when dad is desperately seeking a kidney transplant donor. Mum is so ravished from using heroin for decades her kidney is not an option. She is not only drug addicted, she’s also addicted to a fellow former foster kid, a violent man who beats her. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Woman in the Window A J Finn 2019 What is real? What is imagined? Who is in danger? Who is in control? In this thriller, no one—and nothing—is what it seems.Twisty and powerful, ingenious and moving, The Woman in the Window is a smart, sophisticated novel of psychological suspense that recalls the best of Hitchcock and features an adopted teenage boy. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Safe With Me Grace Lowrie 2017 An emotional and evocative story about the deepest bonds of friendship. Abandoned as children, Kat and Jamie were inseparable growing up in foster care. But their bond couldn't protect them forever. From a troubled upbringing to working in a London greasy spoon, Kat's life has never been easy. On the surface Jamie s living the high-life, but appearances can be deceiving. When they unexpectedly reunite, their feelings become too intense to ignore. But as secrets come back to haunt them, are they destined to be separated once more? External Website

Blogs/Web Pages/Articles Lockdown Poetry Amberleigh Care 2021 Amberleigh Care (UK) has two locations which run as formal therapeutic communities for teenage boys: deliberately structured settings that make real use of groups and relationships. Poetry is always a popular topic for the boys in school because it's a way of expression that they find fun and more free flowing - especially when they can then alter their poems into songs and raps! This time the lesson was based around the NHS graffiti art of Banksy. With the first focus being about how much the NHS is now valued by everyone, the short lessons deepened in thought and reflection to how the boys have had to adapt their lives in lockdown. External Website

Films/Videos 12 Mighty Orphans ​ 2021 12 Mighty Orphans (2021) is an American film based on the eponymous non-fiction book by sports writer Jim Dent. The film tells the story of the Mighty Mites, the football team of an orphanage in Fort Worth, Texas. During the Great Depression, the Mighty Mites went from not having shoes to play in to playing for the Texas championships. They become an inspiration, not only to their city but to their state, even to the nation. Rusty Russell—himself an orphan—was the coach of the Mighty Mites. He is known for developing what’s called the “spread offense” in gridiron football, a way of playing that allowed the Mighty Mites to compete with larger boys. It’s worth staying until the end of the film to find out what the orphan boys ended up doing as adults. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Secrets of Happiness Joan Silber 2021 Secrets of Happiness (2021) by Joan Silber is an exploration of the search for happiness by multiple characters linked (albeit tenuously in some cases) to a man who travels regularly to Asia to supervise the manufacture of underwear for women. This man, we find out, has 2 families living in close proximity to each other in Manhattan. Everything changes when Family 1 finds out about Family 2 (the mother of the 2nd family is the hostess at a Thai restaurant Family 1 frequent). Ethan from Family 1 narrates the first and final chapters. Joe from Family 2 narrates the second chapter and that’s when we find out his younger brother, Jack, is sent off at age 15 to Thailand to live with an aunt because his mother is concerned about who he is hanging out with. Towards the end of the book, we discover that Nadia has been living (since she was 11) in an informal foster care arrangement with dad’s former girlfriend. External Website

Blogs/Web Pages/Articles I’ve Been In A Bad Mood Chris Chmielewski 2016 Chris Chmielewski is the Creator, Owner and Editor of Foster Focus Magazine, America's only monthly foster care magazine. He spent five years in foster care and was expelled from high school just before graduation when he aged out of foster care. In this article Chmielewski talks about being annoyed with the Superhero title: Orphan Fight, that features Batman and Robin. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Murder in the Mill-Race: A Devon Mystery E.C.R. Lorac 2019 Edith Caroline Rivett Lorac was a prolific crime fiction author from the 1930s to the 1950s, and a member of the prestigious Detection Club. In this story, the body of Sister Monica who runs a children's home is found. The police think the death might not be an accidental drowning as Sister Monica was fond of abusing power. External Website