[mantis3216]

I started reading this book when I was in the hospital but never got to finish it. It has been a year now and I haven't been able to find this novel... The problem is that I don't know the author or the title. I was wondering if anyone out there has heard of it.

This story was of a very poor family with lots of problems. The father was an alcoholic and the mother was never a good influence on the kids. The family had to move a lot and I hadn't gotten to the point that says why. >_< The father would just come home one night and say that they had to leave so they would pack everything that they had in the car and drive to live somewhere else. The father finally gets a job as a Janitor of a really high class school for rich people and well known named kids. His two children one little boy and his older sister get to go to this school for free because their father is now an employee of the school. The boy ends up getting into fights and the principal threatens to expel him because no one likes the fact that these kids have the opportunity that they had. The girl wears her prettiest dress to school on her first day and another girl comments and says, "wow you must love that dress a lot because it is looking pretty worn out" This is the only dress this little girl owns. At the time I was reading the family was living in an apartment... or some kind of beat up place with 1 bed and the 2 kids shared the couch.

I really want to finish this story but I don't even know the author. Can anyone help? I do remember that it was a well-known author though.

[Wondergirl]

It sounds like The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. From Amazon reviews --

Jeannette Walls's father always called her "Mountain Goat" and there's perhaps no more apt nickname for a girl who navigated a sheer and towering cliff of childhood both daily and stoically. In The Glass Castle, Walls chronicles her upbringing at the hands of eccentric, nomadic parents--Rose Mary, her frustrated-artist mother, and Rex, her brilliant, alcoholic father. To call the elder Walls's childrearing style laissez faire would be putting it mildly. As Rose Mary and Rex, motivated by whims and paranoia, uprooted their kids time and again, the youngsters (Walls, her brother and two sisters) were left largely to their own devices. But while Rex and Rose Mary firmly believed children learned best from their own mistakes, they themselves never seemed to do so, repeating the same disastrous patterns that eventually landed them on the streets. Walls describes in fascinating detail what it was to be a child in this family, from the embarrassing (wearing shoes held together with safety pins; using markers to color her skin in an effort to camouflage holes in her pants) to the horrific (being told, after a creepy uncle pleasured himself in close proximity, that sexual assault is a crime of perception; and being pimped by her father at a bar). Though Walls has well earned the right to complain, at no point does she play the victim. In fact, Walls' removed, nonjudgmental stance is initially startling, since many of the circumstances she describes could be categorized as abusive (and unquestioningly neglectful). But on the contrary, Walls respects her parents' knack for making hardships feel like adventures, and her love for them--despite their overwhelming self-absorption--resonates from cover to cover. --Brangien Davis

Even if it's not, be sure to read this book.

[mantis3216]

This does not sound like the book I am looking for. But, it does sound like a good book to read thanks for the comment.
~Mantis3216