poor

"As the new year approaches, best friends Ronny, whose family is in financial trouble, and Josefina, who has a big audition at a prestigious music academy, must learn how to depend on one another and their community when things get tough"--Provided by publisher.

"The true story of a high school career defined by poverty and punctuated by outbreaks of domestic abuse. Rex Ogle, who . . . mapped his experience of hunger in 'Free Lunch,' here describes his struggle to survive; reflects on his complex, often paradoxical relationship with his passionate, fierce mother; and charts the trajectory of his stepdad's anger. Hovering over Rex's story is the talismanic presence of his unborn baby sister. Through it all, Rex threads moments of grace and humor . . ."--Provided by publisher.

The author reveals the humiliation that came with the daily outing of his family's hunger and poverty in sixth grade when he had to announce that he participated in his school's free lunch program. While constantly hungry, Ogle also recounts how much he craved the love of family in the face of his parents' abuse and brutality.

In 1967, when his teacher loans him a copy of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," eleven-year-old Ellis Earl Brown is amazed to encounter a family worse off than his own and wonders if happy endings only come in books.

"Born into poverty in southern New Jersey and raised in a commune of single mothers, Mary Anna King watched her mother give away one of her newborn sisters every year to another family. All told, there were seven children: Mary, her older brother, and five phantom sisters. Then one day, Mary was sent away, too. Living in Oklahoma with her maternal grandfather, Mary gets a new name and a new life. But she's haunted by the past: by the baby girls she's sure will come looking for her someday, by the mother she had to leave behind, by the father who left her. Mary is a college student when her sisters start to get back in touch. With each reunion, her family becomes closer to whole again."--Provided by publisher.

Nia, who dreams of an education and the chance at a better life, must battle the dangers of local superstition and thwart her father's plans for her future.

Over the course of time, a luxury steamship loses its luster and is eventually abandoned after changing hands many times. A wealthy family over time loses their wealth and are eventually forced out of the poorest housing available with the others in the community. But when the poor people find the ship and rebuild it, both the ship and its new inhabitants find new purpose in life.

Explores crime-ridden poverty enclaves in America.

Rex Ogle recounts his first semester in sixth grade in which he and his younger brother often went hungry, wore secondhand clothes, and were short of school supplies and he was on his school's free lunch program. Grounded in the immediacy of physical hunger and the humiliation of having to announce it every day in the school lunch line, Rex's is a compelling story of a more profound hunger--that of a child for his parents' love and care.

"As a columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Tony Messenger has spent years in county and municipal courthouses documenting how poor Americans are convicted of minor crimes and then saddled with exorbitant fines and fees. If they are unable to pay, they are often sent to prison, where they are then charged a pay-to-stay bill, in a cycle that soon creates a mountain of debt that can take years to pay off. These insidious penalties are used to raise money for broken local and state budgets, often overseen by for-profit companies, and it is one of the central issues of the criminal justice reform movement."--.