Raising Wrenns

<p><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>A little girl and her fight to claim her place in the world... She's scared she's alone she's brave and she's </span><strong style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)><em>fierce</em></strong><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>. Raising Wrenns is an unflinching look at the messiness of life the sometimes heart-wrenching complexity of family relationships and profound strength of the human spirit. </span></p><p></p><p></p><p><em>The only way people get out of Worcester is in a body bag</em><span> people used to say when Mal was growing up in the Main South neighborhood-crash-landing in house after house like true wrens her family's nutty avian namesake. </span></p><p></p><p></p><p><em>Raising Wrenns </em><span>recounts her trips back to Worcester after the men in her family lost their lives; first her dad when he was shot and later her brother who committed suicide jumping off a roof. On these trips she revisits the shoddy apartments they perched in resurrecting her macabre sometimes comical childhood memories of the streets where they fought bloody and birdlike for their survival. </span></p><p></p><p><span>The book is cordoned by fantastical and scientific stories comparing her family's world and personality traits with those of wrens. It also contains a creative history of Worcester a former factory town plagued by poverty addiction and violence-a cycle that Mal unlike her brother and father was able to escape.</span></p>