KYRA, JUST FOR TODAY

A middle-grade novel showing how children pay the price of living in families where alcohol is abused.

Thirteen-year-old Kyra lives with her mother in Pacifica, a coastal suburb south of San Francisco. Mom, who’s in recovery from alcoholism and has been sober for more than five years, has a house-cleaning business. Kyra often helps her out around the holidays—even skipping school (with her mom’s permission) so she can pick up more jobs. Kyra also makes her mother breakfast, packs her lunch and snacks, tidies the house, and prepares dinner—in addition to negotiating her self-consciousness at school over being “taller and bigger than most of the other seventh-grade girls” and worrying that her best friend is drifting away. When Mom starts coming home late and acting erratically, Kyra doesn’t want to think about why or even share her worries at the support group for children of alcoholics that she attends weekly. Eventually, though, she’s forced to confront both her mother’s behavior and the effect it’s had over the years. Informative and validating, this story is all the more powerful for Kyra’s first-person narration, which underscores her love for her mother and her desire to take care of her, as well as her confusion as she confronts feelings of guilt, resentment, and anger. For anyone affected by an alcoholic family member, this story will resonate with searing truth. Most characters read white.

Authentic and heartbreaking but hopeful.