The Bad Mother

I don't recommend many books on this site, but I highly recommend you read The Bad Mother by Nancy Rommelmann.

From Amazon: "A first novel by the award-winning journalist Nancy Rommelmann, The Bad Mother is set among Hollywood's transient population of street kids….Hollywood is hard on everyone, from aspiring actors and actresses to those on the way back down, but it is particularly indifferent to the children who ghost along the boulevard, unseen by the tourists squatting over Marilyn Monroe's hand prints in front of Grauman's Chinese. As Rommelmann explains, "Hollywood herself is the bad mother of the title."

I read this powerful book in one night and couldn't sleep for hours afterwards. The Bad Mother is a gripping and heartrending tale about broken people clinging to the hardest edges of life. With sharp and unsentimental prose, Rommelmann shows us a world that shouldn't exist, but does. I'll never forget reading it. You won't either.