"Holding on is all fourteen-year-old Stephanie Clare Smith can do when she's left home alone in New Orleans during the summer of 1973. As she seeks to ease her loneliness through her summer algebra class, the city itself, and her friendship with a streetcar operator, adults fail her again and again with devastating consequences. Dreamlike and beautifully paced, this lyrical debut memoir traces that harrowing summer and its repercussions throughout Stephanie's life, including as a caregiver for the mother who abandoned her and in her career as a custody mediator through the court system. Through a mosaic of trauma and transcendence, poverty and neglect, and solitude and longing, Smith reveals how she used her imagination to connect to a world that had largely left her behind. Her hard-won survival echoes that of countless other survivors whose stories are never told, and her strength stands as a testament to the powers of empathy and love"-- Provided by publisher.