Greetings From Witness Protection!

Greetings from Witness Protection (2017) is the debut novel of middle grade author Jake Burt. When the book was first published, it was listed as an Indie Next Selection. Burt has since written four other standalone middle grade novels: The Right Hook of Devin Velma (2018), The Tornado (2019), Cleo Porter and the Body Electric (2020), and The Ghoul of Windydown Vale (2022).

Burt teaches sixth-grade students, so he has firsthand insight into the middle grade experience. In addition, he shares some traits with his characters in Greetings from Witness Protection. Like the Trevors, he has lived in Durham, North Carolina. He’s an avid reader like Charlotte and has a passion for online gaming like Brit.

Greetings from Witness Protection falls under the categories of Children’s Books on Orphans & Foster Homes and Children’s Mystery, Detective, & Spy Books. The novel is intended for readers ages 9-12 in grades 4-6.

This study guide and its page citations are based on the Scholastic Press 2022 Kindle edition of the novel.

Content Warning: The book contains references to criminality and an anxiety disorder as well as descriptions of the challenges of life in foster care. In addition, the novel depicts a family in situations of life-threatening danger. These elements may be too intense for very young readers.

Plot Summary

The action unfolds over the course of a single school year from fall to spring, jumping from locations in New York to Georgia to Durham, North Carolina, where most of the story is set. Events are narrated from the first-person perspective of 13-year-old Nicki Demere, whose alias is Charlotte Ashlynn Trevor. Nicki, a longtime charge of the foster care system, joins the Witness Protection Program, also known as the Witness Security Program (WITSEC), to protect the Trevor family from a mafia hitman, and the novel uses her experience to examine the themes of False Families and the Lack of Authenticity, The Effects of Living With a Fake Identity, and The True Meaning of Home.

As the story begins, 13-year-old Nicki is living at a foster center in New York, awaiting placement with a new foster family. Since she was eight years old, Nicki has been placed five times but has never found a real home. Before foster care, her life was already unstable. Her mother abandoned the family, and Nicki’s father is a career criminal who has spent most of his life behind bars. Larceny runs in the family: Nicki’s grandmother taught her to be a pickpocket at an early age. When Nicki was eight, her grandmother died, leaving her in the care of the foster system. Because of her unstable upbringing, Nicki has trust issues and deals with stress and anxiety through uncontrollable bouts of “kleptomania,” or a compulsive urge to steal. She can’t tolerate anyone touching her hands and refuses to wear gloves even in the coldest weather.

One day at the center, two US deputy marshals who are attached to the Witness Protection Program, also known as the Witness Security Program (WITSEC) interview Nicki. She bears a striking physical resemblance to a woman named Elena Cercatore Sicurezza, a member of a mafia family whose testimony in court has landed several of her relatives in jail. The mafia family has sworn vengeance against Elena as well as her husband and 12-year-old son. WITSEC has just launched a new program called Project Family that involves embedding an operative as a member of a protected family. If Nicki agrees to pose as the family’s daughter, her criminal record will be erased, and she won’t be forced back into the foster care system ever again. After Nicki learns that her own father has been out of jail for two years but never came to claim her, she feels that Project Family may be her only hope for a normal life.

Everyone receives new identities. Nicki becomes Charlotte Ashlynn Trevor. The Sicurezzas become Harriet, Jonathan, and Jackson Trevor. They’re all relocated to Durham, North Carolina, where Charlotte and Jackson will attend Loblolly Middle School together. The Trevors are warned that they must appear perfectly average. Their children can’t be overachievers or underachievers in either classes or sports. They’re also forbidden to maintain social media profiles for fear that a Cercatore assassin may find them.

Charlotte gets off to a bumpy start with Jackson, who deeply resents having a big sister and being uprooted from his past life. When he airs these complaints to his old friends on Facebook, Charlotte quickly shuts down Jackson’s page, but the damage has already been done. Elena (now Harriet) has a “sociopathic” brother, Arturo, and he is on her trail, intending to kill his sister and her entire family. Over time, he tracks the family to Durham and breaks into their house, accompanied by two thugs, one of whom is Charlotte’s biological father. Christian Demere is surprised to see his daughter and protests that he doesn’t want the responsibility of caring for her. Before Arturo can execute the family, Charlotte stuns him using her taser, and he and his accomplices are sent to jail.

The Trevors are then told that they must leave Durham and will receive a new cover identity. The US marshals intend to separate them from Charlotte and send her back into foster care, but the Trevors refuse to allow this. They insist that Charlotte is part of their family. Now able to put her past behind her, Charlotte happily accompanies the Trevors to Arizona to start a new life.