All the Children Are Home

Francis (The Orphans at Race Point) traces the heartbreaking pains of a foster family in this beautifully drawn saga. In small-town Massachusetts in 1959, foster parents Louie Moscatelli, a gruff mechanic, and his reclusive wife Dahlia accept emergency placement of six-year-old Agnes Juniper after she was abused in her previous foster home. After a brief stint with the Moscatellis along with their three other foster children, Jimmy and biological siblings Jon and Zaida, Agnes is placed with a more affluent family, the Dohertys, who want to adopt. But after the Dohertys express dismay about Agnes’s developmental delays and Indigenous heritage, she runs away to the Moscatellis, where she and the other children grow up enduring the community’s scorn as “crummy foster kids.” Three years later, Jon and Zaida’s biological father reappears and takes Jon back to Colorado, cruelly forcing Zaida to choose between joining them and staying with the Moscatellis. Toward the end of the 1960s, Jimmy returns from serving in Vietnam while Agnes is in high school and still living with the Moscatellis, and a frightening person from Agnes’s early childhood reappears, causing a tectonic shift for everybody in the household. The shifting viewpoints and well-rounded characters coalesce to create a tragic and resilient image of an atypical family. This powerful and deeply moving story deserves a wide audience. Agent: Alice Tasman, Jean V. Naggar Literary. (Apr.)