Speranza's Sweater by Marcy Pusey - Book Review

Speranza’s Sweater By Marcy Pusey – Illustrated by Beatriz Mello

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.

Book review:

Speranza’s Sweater by Marcy Pusey is a heartwarming and inspiring story about a sweet and brave little girl, Speranza and her experiences in and out of foster care. Along with her brothers, Speranza gets taken from her home to live with different people who eat funny foods like applesauce. She misses her mother and home terribly! When their foster family moves, Speranza and her brothers have to be split up and that makes her very sad. She describes her feelings towards her parents and how she loves them, and sometimes feels angry. But after Speranza is adopted by her new family who shows her unconditional love, this is when she finds that her true happiness lies in having a family that she can call her forever home. And seeing her brothers happy with their forever families too comforts and brings her joy!

Throughout the story there are charming, bright and colorful illustrations of Speranza and her surroundings along with the book’s headliner: a raggedy old sweater that she insists on wearing despite its worn and tattered condition. There is just something about her favorite sweater from home that comforts Speranza and she just can’t part with it. When Speranza is adopted, her grandmother makes the sweater even more special as a gift to her. A tender and touching moment and the most perfect theme for this sweet book.

This is a great book for any child that is in the foster care system or that has been adopted to use as a gentle coping tool to stabilize any feelings they may have about their experiences. I think it is so important for a child to have visual reading material like Speranza’s Sweater that they can relate to and learn that their feelings are valid and of relevance. I thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated this story and recommend it to children of all ages! An essential book for comforting children, to help them cope and to thoroughly enjoy!!

Children’s book author, Marcy Pusey has certainly written a special, imaginative and inspiring tale. Kids Lit Book Café highly recommends Speranza’s Sweater written by Marcy Pusey – illustrated by Beatriz Mello. Speranza’s Sweater joyfully read and reviewed by Beatrix Bloom for Kids Lit Book Café.

Purchase Speranza’s Sweater by Marcy Pusey for the special child in your life today!
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Speranza’s Sweater: A Child’s Journey Through Foster Care and Adoption by Marcy Pusey
Published by Miramare Ponte Press on March 6, 2018
Genres: Children’s Adoption Books, Children’s Blended Families, Children’s Blended Families Books, Children’s Orphans & Foster Homes Books, Christian Fiction, Emotions, Family Life, Inspirational Fiction, Picture Book, Preschool And Elementary Aged Children
Pages: 32
Format: Hardcover, Kindle, Paperback
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Marcy Pusey’s Website

“Therefore, we who have fled to [God] for refuge can have great confidence as we hold to the hope that lies before us. This hope is a strong and trustworthy anchor for our souls. It leads us through the curtain into God’s inner sanctuary.” Hebrews 6:18b-