It's 2003 and Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women's Correctional Facility, deep in California's Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: the San Francisco of her youth and her young son, Jackson. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and...

Ingrid, a smart, free-spirited, and somewhat narcissistic artist kills her deceitful lover in a crime of passion. Even while serving a prison sentence, she exerts control over her adoring teenage daughter, Astrid, who's forced to spend her teenage years in a series of foster homes before becoming her own person. Explores the strange relationship of Ingrid and Astrid, and includes Astrid's relationship with her foster mothers. At first merely an appendage...

The daughter of an imprisoned debtor suffers injustices of nineteenth-century English society.

Children who have a parent in prison express their feelings of sadness, anger, worry, and embarrassment and suggest that talking to others and keeping in contact with the missing parent helps them deal with the situation.

One in ten American children has a parent under criminal justice supervision-incarcerated, on probation, or on parole. One in thirty-three American children-and one in eight African American children-goes to sleep without access to a parent because that parent is in jail. Despite these staggering numbers, the children of prisoners remain largely invisible to society. Following in the tradition of the bestseller Random Family, journalist Nell Bernstein...

Jacaranda Abbott has always tried to keep her mouth shut. As a foster kid, she's learned the hard way that the less she talks about her mother and why she's in jail, the better. But when a video of Jacaranda singing goes viral, a mysterious benefactor offers her a life-changing opportunity, a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school for performing arts. Eager to start over somewhere new, Jacaranda leaps at the chance, and she pours her heart out...

A searing and profound Southern odyssey by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward. In Jesmyn Ward's first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi's past and present that is both an intimate portrait...

Fifteen-year-old Macy, officially labeled "disturbed" by her school, records her impressions of her rough neighborhood and home life as she tries to rescue her brother from Child Protective Services, win back her overachieving best friend after a fight, and figure out whether to tell her incarcerated father about her mother's cheating.