THROWAWAY KIDS

Philadelphia, 1989. When the caseworkers came for Joey and Mikey Rossi, the luggage was a thirty-gallon Hefty bag the official suitcase of the American foster child.

Joey is eight, a watcher, a counter of ceiling tiles. His older brother Mikey is the kind of kid who stands in doorways so the bad weather has to get through him first. Their father is a South Philly career criminal with ten good minutes of charm and a right hand nobody talks about. Their mother is drowning slowly enough that everyone can pretend she's swimming. What follows is the grand tour of the system: an intake shelter that smells like pine cleaner losing a war, a foster home with a padlocked refrigerator, a farm that wanted labor, an aunt with a houseful of saints and a failing heart, and the government arithmetic that splits two brothers into two states with fifteen minutes to say goodbye.

Thirty years later, Joey runs residential treatment programs for kids in the same two states that ran him. Mikey holds the keys at the prison where their father served time. This is the story of how they got there: the adults who showed up, the ones who didn't, and what a kid can build out of spite.

Darkly funny, brutal, and unexpectedly tender, Throwaway Kids is a novel inspired by true experiences, for readers of Demon Copperhead and The Glass Castle, and for every kid who ever carried their life in a trash bag. You were never the trash.