You'll Never Make the Grade, Dear

Five-year-old Clara believes being very good will buy her mother’s love. If she tries hard enough, she can pull her mother off the knife blade of her anger. But Amelia is enmeshed in a struggle with husband George and has little time for the child. When Amelia faces a second radical mastectomy and believes she’s going to die, she rejects George and turns to Clara for help. They go through letters and other papers, burning them, and Clara finds and hides a journal. In it she discovers that Amelia was raped by her father. Clara, in shock, loses her faith in God. Convinced that being good doesn’t pay, Clara starts smoking, goes out with Paco Salsipuedes, a boy her father finds unacceptable, and teeters between her old world of the squares and the new world of freedom and defiance. Now Clara is the one walking the blade of a knife, barefooted.Greene, Addie is the author of 'You'll Never Make the Grade, Dear' with ISBN 9781413797473 and ISBN 1413797474.