It is 1962 and ten year old Annie is fighting to survive a stepfather and mentally ill mother who abuse her physically and emotionally. It hadn't always been this way. Just a few years before, Annie was safe in Yakima with her parents and three brothers and sisters in the white house with the picket fence and the swing set in the backyard. Then her parents divorced and her mother took the kids to Missouri. Within a year Annie's mother was hospitalized with a nervous breakdown. The children were placed with a Catholic bus driver's family who brutalized Annie's little brother, Sammy. Annie did her best to protect him, but she was eight years old. When her mother came to get them, Annie believed that now everything would be ok. Instead it gets worse. Every day is a struggle, to stay away from the hits and the screams, to escape her mother's look that says that Annie is something less than dirt. Annie doesn't understand why she is singled out for mistreatment. She tries everything she knows to "get through." She pretends not to hear the words, tries not to feel the slaps. Twice she runs away from home. Like any child Annie must determine who she is to become, and, in addition, make sense of the havoc of her life. She forms her own theories about how grownups can be so cruel, and resolves never to be like them. In time she forms an identity apart from her place in her family. At school, she is the smart kid, whom her teachers nurture when her parents do not. This is a child's story, told with a child's voice. It will resonate with anyone who has suffered, or struggled, and found the strength to overcome.
About the Author: Solla Carrock has lived in Washington, Missouri, Virginia, Ohio and Louisiana, but has spent most of her adult life in Portland, Oregon where she came to attend Reed College at age 17. Currently she works as a computer programmer, but has held a wide variety of positions including working with homeless teenage girls, interviewing prison inmates in a drug treatment program, and being a member of Teach For America, teaching art, English and world geography in a high school in Louisiana. Her daughter, Erin, teaches middle school language arts in Portland. Solla has had poetry published in the Portland Review, To Topos, Camroc Press Review, and, in the anthology, Naming: Poems by Eight Women. She edited and contributed to Mothers and Fathers: Being Parents, Remembering Parents. Her short stories have appeared in 34th Paralle, Bartleby Snopes and Ascensions Aspirations. She is author of the novella, Eggtooth.