Beth Raymer

""Florida, we got it all. Motorsports, ribs, beer. You can drive on the sand right on up to the ocean. Fireworks every night." That's how twelve-year-old CC's father, who named her after his beloved Canadian Club whiskey, describes the appeal of their new home. The man is a born grifter, a used-car salesman who burns down his dealership in southern Ohio for enough insurance money to set up a life for himself, his wife, and his two young daughters in a place he picks largely at random, because the living seems easy. CC's mother is thirty-five going on seventeen, a housewife who just wants to drive a Mustang and hang out at the mall. CC's sister goes from loving Debbie Gibson and jelly shoes to having a full-on drug addiction and listening only to heavy metal, after enduring forms of abuse within her family. In the midst of this dysfunction, CC is trying to stay afloat and make it out--to achieve some semblance of a stable life in America while coming up against the structural and cultural challenges of growing up in poverty"--