By Jennifer Wilgocki, Marcia Kahn Wright
A calm, plainspoken picture book that answers the questions a child in foster care is carrying.
This one isn't a story with a plot. It's the book you hand a child who has just moved in with a foster family and is full of questions they don't quite know how to ask. Why am I living here? Did I do something wrong? When do I get to go home? Will I still see my mom and dad? The book answers them plainly, in a child's own words, without pretending anyone knows how it all turns out. That uncertainty is where the title comes from, because so much of foster care is a maybe. Maybe you'll go back to your birth parents. Maybe you'll stay a while longer. Nobody is lying to a child, and nobody is promising what they can't deliver. It also walks through the people a child keeps meeting, the social worker, the judge, the foster parents, so those words stop sounding scary. A section at the back is written straight to the grown-up.
A child new to foster care is often carrying a pile of questions and feelings with no way to sort them, and the book names them one at a time so none of them has to stay a secret. It puts a plain sentence in front of a child who may be quietly blaming themselves: none of this happened because they were bad. And because it stays honest about the maybes, it never hands a child a promise that might break later.