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2) Ellen Foster
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Having suffered abuse and misfortune for much of her life, a young child searches for a better life and finally gets a break in the home of a loving woman with several foster children.
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This story is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a penetrating look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. When sober, Jeannette's brilliant father captured his children's imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and how to embrace life fearlessly. But when he drank, he was dishonest and destructive. Her mother was a free spirit who hated anything to do with domesticity. The Walls children learned to...
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Jillian Slater hadn't seen her father or his mother in almost 20 years until, on the news that her father had finally drunk himself to death, Adella Atwater, the manager of her grandmother's apartment house, calls and says Jillian's expenses would be paid if she'd fly in to New Orleans for the burial. What Adella didn't tell her was that the apartment house bears the dead weight of a long and painful history. As an investigation into her father's...
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[This book] is [an] account of one of the most severe child abuse cases in California history. It is the story of Dave Pelzer, who was brutally beaten and starved by his emotionally unstable, alcoholic mother: a mother who played torturous, unpredictable games - games that left him nearly dead. He had to learn how to play his mother's games in order to survive because she no longer considered him a son, but a slave; and no longer a boy, but an "it."--Back...
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Andrew Morrison sacrificed everything--is childhood, his education, and the girl of his dreams--to look after his alcoholic mother. But enough is enough, and now he's determined to get out and live his life. That means trading the home he grew up in for a rented room in the house of an old childhood friend--both of which are in sorry shape. The only thing worse than Drew's squalid new digs and sullen new roommate is the envy he feels for the house...
9) Lush
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Unable to cope with her father's alcoholism, thirteen-year-old Sam corresponds with an older student, sharing her family problems and asking for advice.
10) Ellen Foster
Summary
Having suffered abuse and misfortune for most of her life, a young girl searches for a better life and finally finds it in the home of a loving woman with several foster children.
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The New York Times bestseller—now with new material. Louie Anderson has appeared many times on "The Tonight Show", and his comedy specials on HBO and Showtime have won him wide acclaim. In this series of emotionally charged letters to his alcoholic father, Anderson reveals the sense of shame and insecurity that fuels his comic routines.
12) The glass castle
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Chronicling the adventures of an eccentric, resilient and tight-knit family. A remarkable story of unconditional love. A young woman who, influenced by the joyfully wild nature of her deeply dysfunctional father, found the fiery determination to carve out a successful life on her own terms.
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Growing up in their family's ancestral home in Wales, Jonathan Anthony and his little sister, Theo, are inseparable, inventing magical worlds and buttressing each other against the loneliness of life with their alcoholic mother, Alicia. When a family tragedy brings their glamorous grandmother, Eve, home from America, Jonathan and Theo are initially elated by the attention she lavishes on them. But soon it becomes clear that there is more to the Anthony...
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When his mother passed away at the age of 78, Sherman Alexie responded the only way he knew how: he wrote. The result is this memoir. Featuring 78 poems and 78 essays, Alexie shares raw, angry, funny, profane, tender memories of a childhood few can imagine -- growing up dirt-poor on an Indian reservation, one of four children raised by alcoholic parents. Throughout, a portrait emerges of his mother as a beautiful, mercurial, abusive, intelligent,...
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"Shuggie Bain is the unforgettable story of young Hugh "Shuggie" Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher's war on heavy industry has put husbands and sons out of work, and the city's notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the wings. Shuggie's mother Agnes walks a wayward path: she is Shuggie's guiding light but a burden for his artistic brother and practical sister. She dreams of...
18) Song of the road
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Returning to her childhood home in Depression-era New Mexico, pregnant and penniless widow Marilee is distraught to learn of her father's death and her mother's alcoholism but vows to revive the family's motor court business.
19) Kissing lessons
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"Hayden Vargas is a girl with a bad reputation who really just wants to finish high school and get away from her alcoholic mother and the whole boring high school dating scene, so when Emmaline Martin offers to pay her for lessons in attracting and managing boys it seems like a way to pick up some easy money for her post-high school life--but she did not count on the attraction she feels for her client's brother, Nolan, who is not only gorgeous, but...