The Benefits of Being an Octopus

Zoey is a tween, living in a trailer that belongs to her mother's boyfriend, attending school but doing very little work, caring for her young siblings while Zoey's mother and the boyfriend work their low-end jobs. It's an impossible life for all of them, but the trailer and the reliable transportation the boyfriend offers have lifted the small family marginally up, and Zoey's mom struggles to pacify her boyfriend so that the family has a clean place to live and food to eat. Zoey can do little but watch the relationship between her mom and her mom's boyfriend deteriorate as Zoey's mom becomes smaller and smaller to appease her boyfriend.

And then a teacher reaches out to Zoey, and Zoey gradually learns a new way to deal with problems.

POSSIBLE SPOILERS

Slowly, Zoey and her mom begin to take action. The reader is left in the end with the hope that things will get better, but nothing is certain.

I know literally hundreds of students in my town and others across America who would benefit from reading this book, from seeing their lives, possibly for the first time, in a story. It isn't often that I read books with children of poverty as the main characters, and I thank the author for taking on this subject. I also thank the author for not tacking on a happily-ever-after ending; that certainly never seems to happen in real life.