The silver star - Jeannette Walls

It is 1970 in a small town in California. Bean* Holladay is twelve and her sister, Liz, is fifteen when their artistic mother, Charlotte, takes off to find herself, leaving her girls enough money to last a month or two.

When Bean returns from school one day and sees a police car outside the house, she and Liz decide to take the bus to Virginia, where their widowed Uncle Tinsley lives in the decaying mansion that’s been in Charlotte’s family for generations.

An impetuous optimist, Bean soon discovers who her father was and hears many stories about why their mother left Virginia in the first place. Because money is tight, Liz and Bean start working for local bully Jerry Maddox, foreman of the mill in town. Bean adores her whip-smart older sister—inventor of word games, reader of Edgar Allan Poe, and nonconformist. But when school starts in the fall, it’s Bean who easily adjusts and makes friends, and Liz who becomes increasingly withdrawn.

And then something happens to Liz in the car with Maddox.

Jeannette Walls, supremely alert to abuse of adult power, has written a heartbreaking and redemptive novel about an intrepid girl who challenges the injustice of the adult world—a triumph of imagination and storytelling.