Notes

• "From an early age, Mary Childers loves her family fiercely but refuses to repeat her mother’s or older sisters’ mistakes. She doesn’t believe that school is optional and that "men are the source of all happiness and all despair." The child of an absent carny father and a single mother who schemes and struggles to house and feed her brood, Mary is the third of her mother’s surviving seven children, who were fathered by four different men. If her mother’s romantic charisma can occasionally brighten their dim, roach-infested two-bedroom apartment, her alcohol-inspired moodiness and irresponsibility can leave her children hungry and desperate. Determined to live differently, Mary finds refuge first in books and then in work. Self-sufficiency, she realizes by the age of twelve, is her only reliable ticket out of Bronx neighborhoods increasingly characterized by arson, rampant crime, and racial conflict." "In a culture where fatherless children are the norm and academic achievement and hard work are often scorned, Mary seems to alienate her family and friends at every turn. Yet she blazes her own bumpy path out of the tight circle of poverty."–BOOK JACKET