IF WISHES WERE HORSES

A teenaged girl comes of age under the worst possible circumstances—in a grim but moving third novel from Whiteford (Dog People, 1998, etc.).

Sixteen-year-old narrator Star Hennessey and her brother Lucky become wards of the state in 1972 when their mother Mildred—an alcoholic prostitute given to brawling with her customers—is arrested on vice charges and loses custody. For two years, Star and Lucky live at a Catholic orphanage, and then they’re placed in a foster home along with two boys called Skeeter and Pig. The foster home, run by a kindly couple, is better than the orphanage but still depressing and loveless in a semi-Dickensian way. Mildred visits them from time to time, always promising to get them out as soon as she’s raised money for a new home, but Star knows better than to take her at her word. Instead, she seeks escape through her love of poetry—one of the few legacies of any value received from her beatnik mother—and begins to write it herself. Before long, however, her life is complicated further when she learns that she’s pregnant with Pig’s child. She has no money for an abortion, so she goes off to a home for unwed mothers to deliver the child. She knew a girl from the orphanage who killed herself after giving her baby up, which gives her fear a personal edge, but Star finds that writing about her anxiety and dread not only makes her situation easier but gives her a clearer sense of herself and her abilities. Eventually, writing becomes more than a pastime, and she understands that her future can be created from elements that were never present in her unhappy past.

A strong, fresh, and vivid account of adolescence that doesn’t sink into morbid sentimentality or hip despair.