The Art of Dumpster Diving

<p>Sixteen-year-old James and his little brother Danny live in Crystal Springs Louisiana with their grandmother mother and first cousin Lila. The family is working class proud strict and church-going. When a big clumsy boy named Gabriel moves up the street with his minuscule and mysterious auntie James has a new friend who he loves and hates in equal measure. When Grandma dies and Lila runs away James and Danny's mother struggles to make things work but something's wrong so wrong that one awful day James finds his mother lying in her bed dead. Panicked he runs to the only person he can think of his friend Gabriel. Gabriel insists that if the authorities know that there are no adults at home they'll send James and Danny away to foster care or worse and ends up convincing James that the only way to maintain any kind of decent life for himself and his little brother is to carry on as if things are normal. The boys bury the body under an abandoned house and as James tries to make ends meet (procuring food from dumpsters) things become increasingly desperate. ??It's Gabriel who comes up with a master plan to find a woman who looks enough like the boys' mother that she can pass for her---and get money out of the bank. They recruit Lucetta from a soup kitchen and she moves in. For a while things begin to look up---and then they fall apart completely. But in the process of losing everything James and his brother Danny gain a new family one based on grit faith and hope.</p>