Young and Poor (and Forgotten) in America

Another in my series of book-review-as-memoir

We are still hanging out in the beautiful Gulf Islands south of Nanaimo. Canada Day was sunny and actually hot—definitely the most summer-like weather we have seen so far. The Fourth of July will be a perfectly quiet affair here, which suits us fine right now as we are definitely not feeling like celebrating the good old U.S. of A.

The current U.S. administration, aided by a majority of the congress, hit a new low this week—in which seems like a trend now—by pushing through a bill that will cut health care and food stamps (now called SNAP) for the poorest Americans. And, as everyone knows, a significant percentage of the poor people in this country are children (the United Way says there are about 9 million children living in poverty). Reading about this bill has made me heartsick and frustrated, especially since my Democratic senators and congress people couldn’t do a damn thing to stop it becoming law. The Man Who Would Be King has his GOP courtiers wrapped around his finger, and they’re eagerly turning their backs on the least fortunate in their own constituencies.

Now that the bill has passed the House, it will set the stage for sickness and death and homelessness and despair in wholesale numbers. I say homelessness because most personal bankruptcy cases are due to unpaid medical bills or other health care costs. The small, very ugly bill also guarantees that many American children will live in a way that fails to inspire their dreams or give them any hope for the future. Having toured many poor neighborhoods doing children’s theater (NYC and the boroughs, in Florida and Georgia, and in Southern California). I saw children coming to school with plastic sandals on their bare feet on chilly December mornings, and have been told by teachers that they arrive early to make sure they get the free breakfast; though many years have passed, I know the plight of our poor kids has not changed.

The most terrible part is that the deep cuts to social services for the least entitled Americans are only “needed” in order to offset the tax cuts for the most entitled—the rich, and wealthy corporations. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

All this sets the stage for another installment in my ongoing series of “book review as memoir.”

Having been an avid reader for more than half a century, I can tell you one thing that almost every modern American novel leaves out: What it’s like to be a poor kid in the Western part of this country. Plenty of novels and a host of memoirs detail growing up in Eastern tenements, and dirt poor in the South, like the main character in Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, but those lives are so different from the life of most poor kids in the Western U.S. that they might as well have been lived in another country. A fine recent novel, Dispossessed, tells of a young Mexican American orphan growing up in Los Angeles’ Chavez Ravine before his local Hispanic community was kicked out to make way for the ballpark and other developments. But that was so long ago, and the bucolic setting was hardly more than a farm hamlet on the edge of a city.

Dare to Dream is the first in a proposed five-book series by Amanda LaPera, the author of two award-winning memoirs about coping with a parent with extreme mental health issues, Losing Dad and Finding Dad. The book series is written for Young Adult readers but will be read and appreciated by many adults, if my experience is any indication.

Kiara is barely of school age in the late 1970s when her newly divorced mother moves them from the Los Angeles suburbs into a newly built house in Lake Los Angeles, up in the Antelope Valley. Their bleak high-desert neighborhood, full of other cheaply and shoddily built new homes, sits with a cluster of others on the edge of a failed housing development that has just barely managed to achieve city status.

Though I am of the previous generation, and never lived in that particular area, I did grow up in California, and this is the first book I’ve read that came close to capturing my experiences as a child growing up. Not only does Kiara get bullied by other kids over her clothes and appearance, but she misses out on so many “normal” experiences that other girls get to have because of not having the money for them, or, due to financial issues, the ride to or from the events. (kids I knew went to summer camp and theater camp and riding camp and dance camp. The only camp I went to was being bussed up to the local mountains to spend a week in log cabins in winter, when I was in sixth grade, paid for largely by my elementary school.)

I related to Kiara being from a family that recycles clothes, shoes, and school supplies to get every shred of usefulness from them (I wore my bothers hand-me-down corduroys and OP shirts, claiming I’d picked them out; I doubt anyone was fooled). In the years when we got food stamps I was wary about using them at the grocery store for fear someone from my seventh grade classes would see and call me out in school. And the shame of getting a free lunch (yes, the vouchers had to be handed over each day, so no one missed knowing it) was almost as bad as having to bring a sandwich and an apple in a paper sack when others were dining in the cafeteria. The only thing worse than all this embarrassment is going hungry, which I never did, though I often wanted to eat things we couldn’t afford, like steak.

In Dare to Dream, Kiara’s mom and grandmother bugging her to turn off the heat on chilly nights struck a nerve—people think if you live in California you’ve never been cold, but an unheated house in winter can be cold, especially in the high desert. Growing up in “always sunny” San Diego, we were allowed to turn on the central heat on winter mornings, and I’d stand over the register in my flannel nightgown trying to get warm, but if we were cold at night, we were told to “put on a sweater or go to bed.”

Kiara grows up in the course of this first book, finding some relief from her sad, solitary childhood and her mom’s indifferent parenting by becoming friends with sweet, smart Cole and tough, bruised Carolyn. The series will feature the same time-frame and setting but have different protagonists—Carolyn is the protagonist of the second book, Reach for Hope, out soon.

Neither of these books indulges in pat solutions or easy answers, and the rough language the kids employ has not been cleaned up—it sounds as coarse as the language in any school yard, so if that is a deal-breaker for you or your child/grandchild, be forewarned; if not, I definitely recommend the books for mature teens (and older readers too).

Two other new books I recommend:

Just Want You Here by Meredith Turits is another great example of how compelling fiction can be, even with none of the obvious plot additions that so many modern novels jam in to hook us—dead bodies, guns, drugs, police, gangs, and more. This is a relatively simple story (newly single woman makes bad relationship choice—told so damn well that I was up later than usual on more than one night. The characters are as real as the person across the dinner table, and the emotions really hit home. If you want fiction that keeps you turning pages, this novel is for you.

Down to the Bone by Caitlin Rother is the story of the long search for justice in the murder of the McStay family. If you are a dyed-in-the-wool true crime fan (or a criminal trial buff), you’ll definitely want to read this book. If you are a more casual true crime fan, you might be a bit overwhelmed by all the detailed information in it. Remember, there were two different sheriffs departments involved, two potential crime scenes, one massive, overlong, and sometimes ridiculous trial, a doucmentray film, and a million theories spawned by everyone from authors and journalists to the witnesses and suspects themselves. That is a lot to cover, but Rother gets it all in. I personally found the book fascinating, especially as I was familiar with the events at the time and knew many of the locations.

We are heading off across the strait of Georgia to Vancouver soon…we are excited to see the biggest city in British Columbia. We will stay in a marina to begin with, so we can check out its bustling waterfront, walk its busy streets, and hopefully discover a few of its secrets.

hasta pronto!