Blackbird

By Jennifer Lauck
Has anybody read this book? The subtitle is A Childhood Lost and Found
It's about a little girl growing up amid a lot of trouble. Her mother is very sick, but she never knows why. She starts out as a very little girl and describes her mother: Mama is coffee and cigarettes and Big Red chewing gum. There are a lot of very tangible descriptions that bring you into her story as if you are there. Her wicked step mother makes her move her own furniture from one house to another and she describes it: I dragged my princess bed up eleven blocks, through seven traffic lights, up the steps, etc. And then she had to go back for the rest of her special princess furniture.
The story is all tangible, how she moves in the circles she's thrown into. She doesn't seem to relate to anybody else except that they are in close proximity to her physically and it was interesting, after this class, to recognize how detached she really was from the physical world throughout the story.