![]() ![]() ![]() Informed by cultural experiences such as Livington's love for Wonder Woman and Nancy Drew and her experiences with the Girl Scouts and Roman Catholicism, this lyrical memoir firmly eschews sentimentality, offering instead a meditation on what it means to hunger and showing that poverty can strengthen the spirit just as surely as it can grind it down. ![]() While struggling to make sense of her world, Livingston perceives the stresses and patterns that keep children-girls in particular-trapped in the cycle of poverty. ![]() Along the way, the young Sonja observes the harsh realities her family encounters, as well as small moments of transcendent beauty that somehow keep them going. From an old farming town to an Indian reservation to a dead-end urban neighborhood, Livingston and her siblings follow their nonconformist mother from one ramshackle house to another on the perpetual search for something better. One of seven children brought up by a single mother, Sonja Livingston was raised in areas of western New York that remain relatively hidden from the rest of America. When you eat soup every night, thoughts of bread get you through. A memoir of growing up poor and hungry in 1970s western New York: "Like an American version of Angela's Ashes."-Kathleen Norris, New York Times-bestselling author of The Cloister Walk ![]()
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