Joy Delamere is suffocating from severe asthma, overprotective parents, and an emotionally-abusive boyfriend when she escapes to the streets of nearby Seattle and falls in with a "street family" that teaches her to use a strength she did not know she had.

Reviews

"I dare you to set it down during its last hundred pages. I dare you."--Deb Caletti, National Book Award nominee for Honey, Baby, Sweetheart, for Tell Me a Secret

Gr 9 Up-Joy feels like she's being smothered. The 17-year-old from a privileged family has asthma, but she suffers even more from her suffocating circumstances. Her professional parents want to keep her safe, and her wealthy boyfriend, Asher, is stifling her as well. A slick-talking sadist, he has manipulated Joy to the point where she hardly recognizes herself in the desperate, clingy, self-destructive girl she has become. She thinks there is no way out of her gilded cage except flight, so she stages her own abduction and disappears into Seattle's street life. Miraculously, the teen keeps her relatively innocent perspective throughout most of her sojourn, thanks in large part to the intervention of a street musician and his little family of thrown-away teens. Ultimately, the true terror of life on the streets is revealed when Joy finds a friend beaten nearly to death by a john. She activates her cell phone and calls 911, which allows her parents to find her. Re-entry into her loving family is swift and begs the question: Was it really necessary for Joy to inflict such suffering merely to break up with her boyfriend? The storytelling is less than subtle, but it has strengths in the portrayal of an overprotected young woman's emotional bondage and in the vivid depiction of Pacific Northwest communities. From hyper-rich society fundraisers to the grungy late-night alleys of Capitol Hill, from students at Starbucks to Seattle's vibrant underground music scene, the settings are keenly observed and memorable.-Carolyn Lehman, Humboldt State University, Arcata, CA (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.