After four different foster placements, Min is back at Children’s Aid a week before Christmas. She has no family, no birthday, no idea of where she came from. Then Jess Hart, a former Children’s Aid doctor who sees past Min’s hardened shell, decides to take Min home for the holidays. Has Min found her place at last?
War-torn Afghanistan could not seem farther from Newfoundland, but it is about to change twelve-year-old tomboy Jack Cooper (or Jacqueline, as her mother insists on calling her) forever. When her father is killed in the war, she watches helplessly as her mother crumbles under sorrow and depression. Jack and her younger sister and brother, Tessa and Simon, end up across the country, living on a run-down farm in a small town on the Prairies with a great-grandmother they didn’t know existed. Worried that they will be abandoned again if Gran moves into a retirement home, Jack puts on a brave face and encourages Tessa and Simon to take on the challenges of their new life. In the process, she learns that families come in many different forms and that love, trust, and faith can build a home anywhere.
Cassy is forced to stay with her mother in a squatter’s settlement of artists, where she joins the group in producing an educational program about wolves and inadvertently learns that her missing father is a notorious terrorist.
A photographic study of life on the plains of Tanzania follows Kisululu, a young Maasai boy living in the village of Olbalbal, as he helps out with family chores, plays games with his friends, and learns the skills he will need as an adult.