The result is captivating.Ghostbreadis a heartrending encounter with an adept essayist." -ForeWord, "Livingston writes with an understated restraint and paints her past in careful detail. Educators as well as high school students will find many insights about the strength of the individual spirit."-Judith Repman, University Press Books, "Livingston writes with an understated restraint and paints her past in careful detail. Told in short vignettes, Sonja Livingston shares what it was like to grow up in poverty in the 1970's. Her thoughtful testimony sheds new light on a tragic predicament that now affects not only lower-income families, but the entire nation."- Booklist, "This moving and inspirational memoir deserves to find the same popularity as Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle.
harrowing and hilarious."-Caroline Leavitt, author ofGirls in Trouble, "Livingston reveals the daily challenges poverty-stricken young children face. Livingston 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. Larger cultural experiences such as her love for Wonder Woman and Nancy Drew and her experiences with the Girl Scouts and Roman Catholicism inform this lyrical memoir. 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." Ghostbread makes real for us the shifting homes and unending hunger that shape the life of a girl growing up in poverty during the 1970s.
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