prisoners' families

Explores the impact of incarceration on families, and offers encouragement and advice for children eagerly awaiting their parents' release.

Eleven-year-old Ruby Danes has a real best friend for the first time ever, but agonizes over whether or not to tell her a secret she has never shared with anyone, that her mother has been in prison since Ruby was five, and over whether to express her anger to her mother.

Explores the kinds of emotions children might feel when one of their parents is incarcerated, offering reassurance to kids with parents in jail that even though they are apart they can still be a family.

Seventeen years after she was born to a prison inmate, Deja agrees to raise her newest half-sister for the first six months, until their mother's next release, but despite the help of friends and relatives and a support program at school, caring for a baby proves to be a monumental task.

Since her mother went to prison to await execution, eleventh-grader Camila Hernandez has been shuffled from one aunt to another, avoiding friendships and keeping to herself in hopes no one will learn her secret, and worrying that she will turn out to be a criminal, too.

Puzzling over conflicting advice from family members, seventeen-year-old DeQuin Lewis continually faces trouble in his St. Paul, Minnesota, neighborhood, until a betrayal leads him to fresh start in an alternative school, one confrontation away from losing everything.

Eleven-year-old Ruby Danes has a real best friend for the first time ever, but agonizes over whether or not to tell her a secret she has never shared with anyone--that her mother has been in prison since Ruby was five--and over whether to express her anger to her mother.

Seventeen years after she was born to a prison inmate, Deja agrees to raise her newest half-sister for the first six months, until their mother's next release, but despite the help of friends and relatives and a support program at school, caring for a baby proves to be a monumental task.