Brooke (Orphans Series #3)

Brooke, the narrator for Runaways, has the least traumatizing foster experience of the four. She's adopted by an ex-beauty queen who is determined to make Brooke win all the pageants she didn't win as a teen. But Brooke -- naturally athletic and quite the tomboy -- has other plans in mind. She's stuck with a foster mom who's nuts, and a foster dad who's sympathetic but of little help, but there's little here that's likely to give anyone nightmares. Fortunately, Brooke is such a likable, intelligent character that you'll still be hanging on every page.

"The face of fear I display in my novels is not the pale specter from the sunken grave, nor is it the thing that goes bump in the night," V. C. Andrews once told Douglas E. Winter. "Mine are the deep-seated fears established when we are children, and they never quite go away: the fear of being helpless, the fear of being trapped, the fear of being out of control."