Speranza's Sweater: A Child's Journey Through Foster Care and Adoption

Kids deserve a safe place to live and grow and learn. For some kids, this means living with foster or adoptive parents. Speranza's Sweater chronicles one child's experience through the foster and adoptive system. Speranza wears her sweater everywhere, hanging onto the last memories of her birth home, until it's threadbare. Like her unraveled sweater, Speranza must weave together a new story, bringing threads from her past and strands from her present, into a future of love, family, and the true meaning of home. In this heart-warming and reassuring story, children are offered permission to feel and experience their own story authentically. It provides hope and support for the many mixed emotions a child will experience during their foster and adoption journey, through the unraveling and re-weaving of a favorite sweater. Speranza also introduces children to potential life experiences of foster and adopted classmates, friends, or family members. By reading Speranza's story with your child, and discussing the experience of a child in a similar situation, you can create a safe space to talk about feelings of grief, loss, excitement, confusion, anger, sadness, or any of the many other feelings accompanying removal, foster care, and adoption. Speranza's Sweater also includes a dictionary of words to empower children and their carers by understanding the language used around them.

About the Author :
Marcy is the mother of four humans and two pups, but she's also tossed pizzas for a pizzeria, acted and sang in a musical, advocated for families with special needs, made appearances in a few movies, and mimed with balloon animals at the Halifax Busker Festival. Marcy is also a Certified Rehabilitation Counselor and Certified Trauma & Resilience Practitioner, international speaker, Story Coach, and the best-selling author of books for adults and for children. She does her best writing on retreats with a nearby hot tub, in any castle, and within view of the sea. Marcy loves the smiles and giggles of kids who see themselves in her pages and the tearful nods of adults who realize they're not alone by her words. You can watch and share her TEDx Talks: "How Story Empowers Kids to Shape our World" & "You Are More Than Your Traumatic Experiences."

Review :
"We have loved this book in our family! It is so informative to what young children in the foster system go through, and really allows children who have not had that experience to gain insight into what it must be like for a child in that scenario, in a gentle and truthful way. I will continue reading this to our children as they get older and hope that it will spark good conversation! The story is lovely and so very sweet!" --Morgan and Tucker Burke "I read this story to my nieces. While they sat attentively listening, I wonder if connected with Speranza even more than they did. Speranza's story is an artistic and emotional story that reminded me that to feel is to be brave, even in the face of possible loss, even in the face of possible heartache...Feel everything, be human, be brave and know that each moment spent feeling is a beautiful, unguarded, wholly human gift. Whatever comes will come, and you can face it head-on when it does, but in this moment, just feel the wholeness of the present with the entirety of your emotional self. "As an adoptive mom, I'm always looking for quality children's books that address the topic of adoption. It isn't easy to find books that balance the sense of loss alongside the beauty and hope of adoption. This book does that wonderfully. It is gently and sensitively told and will appeal to a wide range of ages (including parents!). The illustrations are lovely and the story itself is engaging. My daughter loved it, and so did I." --Kimberly Miller