“On Christmas morning when I was eight,” Anna recalls, “I woke up early in our apartment in Redding to find my mother wasn’t in her bed in her room, wasn’t home at all” (62). Eight-year-old Anna Hart does not understand yet, but she and her siblings have been abandoned. Although Anna tries for several days to provide her siblings with some sense of “normalcy” (she explains the lack of Christmas presents because an ice storm in the North Pole delayed Santa), neighbors summon the police. In short order, the three are dropped into the foster care system, separated from each other, and taken from the only home they have known.

In interviews after the publication of When the Stars Go Dark, author Paula McLain spoke candidly of her own experience in the foster care system and how, for her, the novel was always more than a mystery thriller, more than a police procedural. The novel offered her the opportunity to investigate the trauma of a child placed into foster care and how, no matter how resilient or courageous the child might be, the experience burdens them with emotional weight they carry into adulthood. In deciding to invest herself in Cameron’s case, despite her struggle with her guilt over the death of her daughter, Anna emerges as a kind of wounded healer, a caring and giving heart able to understand Cameron because Anna also lived through the trauma of foster care.