children of alcoholics

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.

Western New York, 1978: Jamie, Lewis, and Connor Thurber watch their parents??? destructive dance of loving, hating, and drinking. Terrance Thurber spends this year teaching his children about the natural world: they listen to the heartbeat of trees, track animal footprints, sleep under the star-filled sky. Despite these lessons, he doesn???t show them how to survive without him. And when these seasons of trying and failing to quit booze and be a better man are over, Terrance is gone. Alone with their artist mother, Catrin, the Thurber children are left to grapple with the anger they feel for the one parent who deserted them and a growing resentment for the one who didn???t. As Catrin withdraws into her own world, Jamie throws herself into painting while her brothers smash out their rage in brutal, no-holds-barred football games with neighborhood kids. Once they can leave???Jamie for college, Lewis for the navy, and Connor for work???they don???t look back. But Terrance does. Crossing the country, sobering up, and starting over has left him with razor-sharp regret. Terrance doesn???t know that Jamie, now an academic, inhabits an ever-shrinking circle of loneliness; that Lewis, a merchant marine, fears life on dry land; that Connor struggles to connect with the son he sees teetering on an all-too-familiar edge. He only knows that he has one last try to build a bridge, through the years, to his family.

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.

Compiles first-person accounts of young adults discussing their experiences with drugs and alcohol or as children of alcoholics and drug addicts.

For most of his young life Avery has dealt with his alcoholic mother with the help of his grandfather, Pal, he immerses himself in poetry and popular music, and now that high school is over for the summer, he makes out with his best friend Luca (who understands about alcoholic mothers), but the death of his grandfather creates a hole in his life that he can not seem to crawl out of.

"Jules never knew her father, and her ex-addict mother has always been more interested in artistic endeavors than in bonding with her only daughter. Her life and future look as flat and unchanging as her small Illinois town. A simple quest to find a baby picture for the senior yearbook leads to the discovery that for most of the first two years of her life, Jules lived in foster care. As Jules sets out to learn the truth about her past, what she finds is a family who loved her as their own and hoped to adopt her. Even a now-adult foster brother is overjoyed to see his sister again. When the divide between Jules and her biological mother widens, Jules finds herself on the brink of losing everything."--Provided by publisher.

Maverick Falconer is just starting middle school and he wishes he were a hero like his father because maybe then he could deal with his mother's drinking and series of abusive boyfriends, not to mention the kids who bully him in middle school (pretty much the same ones who bullied him in elementary school)--but as the year passes he begins to realize that other kids have problems too, and maybe if they can all survive sixth-grade things will get better.

Memoir of journalist Jeannette Walls about her dysfunctional family that at times soared high--her father, when sober, would teach her and her siblings about geology, physics, and zest for life, but when drunk was destructive; and her mother, a "free spirit," hated the idea of domesticity. As a result, Jeannette and her siblings raised themselves and made their own prosperity, even as their parents became homeless.

They were five kids with five different fathers and an alcoholic mother who left them to fend for themselves for weeks at a time as she came and went from their lives. When Regina, the sister who looked after them and protected Rosie, the youngest, disclosed their plight to a social worker, Rosie was promptly removed and placed in foster care. But their mother kidnapped her and took her to a farm in Idaho where Rosie endured physical and emotional abuse. Like her sister Regina, Rosie found strength to overcome her life and escape.