Starred Review In this continuation of Ogle's memoir, begun in the YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award winning Free Lunch (2019), Rex is entering high school and parts of his life have improved. His family can now afford food since both parents are working, but physical and mental abuse from Mom and stepdad Sam continues. He details watching Sam throw his mother through a window, feeling compelled to lie that everything is OK when the police investigate, being attacked by his mother with scissors, and attempting to protect his younger brother from the unabated violence. Linking all these incidents is the mystery of what happened to Rex's half sister, Marisa, who was born and died while Rex was away visiting other family death that his mother claims is Rex's fault. The events depicted are often excruciating, but Ogle also addresses some of the reasons for domestic violence (including unaddressed trauma and being abused as a child), the decision to interrupt the cycle of abuse, and the need to cut ties completely with one's abuser. While Ogle acknowledges that this will be too intense a read for many, other readers will see themselves in Rex and appreciate the hope he offers: life can get better. Appended with an author's note and referral sources, this should be widely available to anyone who needs it.

The author of Free Lunch (2019) continues his account of an abusive childhood into adolescence.Reassuring readers in similar situations in the notes he places fore and aft that he survived, and they can too, Ogle focuses here on his home life. Beginning with a flashback to age 7 when he came back from a long stay with grandparents to the news that he would have had a baby sister, but she was dead and it was his fault, he chronicles in explicit detail high school years of screaming matches and vicious beat downs by both his wildly unstable Mexican American mom and alcoholic White stepfather between times when they beat on each other. The little sister he never had (stillborn, it turns out, after a typically brutal parental argument) plays a continuing role in his story, as both a source of crushing guilt, no less devastating for being undeserved, and a ghostly presence who helps him control his own tendency toward outbursts of rage. What emerges in the wake of all the bruises, blood, vomit, denial, and psychological battering is less a feeling of relief that Ogle succeeded in becoming an independent adult, than a sense that, despite the hopeful ending and his speaking of letting go and moving on, his personal journey takes a back seat here to an indictment of the irrecoverably broken grown-ups charged with raising him.Grim reading, with reassurance just the barest glimmer in a nightmarish landscape. (resources) (Memoir. 14-18)