The Secret Diary of a Newly Qualified Social Worker
We Don’t Steal Babies
People ask social workers at parties if they steal babies. This is the answer.
Maisie MacDonald is twenty-five, newly qualified, and armed with a one-eyed cat, a lanyard and the belief that she can save everyone.
Over one year in Coventry she will keep a boy’s toy car safe until he is ready to stop running. She will wait outside a door while a fifteen-year-old tells a camera the worst thing that ever happened to her. She will watch a young mum she fought for walk back to the man who broke her. She will fall for exactly the wrong barrister, and find out how wrong in open court.
Told through Maisie’s diary, her anonymous blog and the case files in between, this is a novel about the job nobody understands and the people who do it anyway. It is funny. Then it isn’t. Then it is both, in the same afternoon.
Paperback, 352 pages, £9.99. Kindle edition, £3.99. Also in Kindle Unlimited. ISBN 9798177692265.
What it is
It is a novel. It is set in Coventry between September 2015 and August 2016, and it follows one newly qualified social worker through her first year in a children’s services team.
It is funny. Then it isn’t. Then it is both in the same afternoon, which is the job.
Who is in it
Maisie, who is twenty-five and thinks she can save everyone. Ray, her mentor, who has been doing this for thirty years and knows she can’t. Heather, the assistant team manager, who is always right and never gentle about it.
Billy, who is nine, and who carries a red toy car everywhere he goes. Hana, who is fifteen, and draws doors. Jade, who is eighteen, and has a four-month-old and a file of her own.
A barrister. A paramedic. A one-eyed cat.
Meet them properly, without spoilers.
How it is told
Three ways. The diary, where Maisie is honest. The blog, where she is braver than she feels. The case files, where she disappears altogether.
Every diary entry begins with the day’s numbers.
- Statutory visits: 1
- Children who stole my heart: 1
- Toy cars now in my possession: 1
The distance between what goes in the file and what happened in the room is where most of the book lives.
Who it is for
Social workers, who will recognise the car park. Students and the newly qualified, who are about to. Foster carers, teachers, health visitors, police officers and anybody else who has sat in a strategy meeting wondering who booked the room.
And anybody who has ever asked one of us at a party what we do all day. This is the long answer.
Is it true?
No. The children, the families and the workers are invented, and so are the cases. Nothing in it is taken from a real file.
What is true is the job. The author has done it for many years.
A word about the subject
The book is about child protection, so it includes neglect, domestic abuse, the sexual abuse of a teenager, and grief. None of it is graphic. All of it is treated with care. If any of it is close to home, there is a page for that.