Friday Memes: Juvie by Steve Watkins

Book Beginnings is hosted by Rose City Reader and the Friday 56 is hosted by Freda's Voice.

Juvie by Steve Watkins. 320 p. Candlewick Press, October, 2013. 9780763655099.

Publisher synopsis: 

Heart-wrenching and real, Juvie tells the story of two sisters grappling with accountability, sacrifice — and who will be there to help you after you take the fall.

Sadie Windas has always been the responsible one — she’s the star player on her AAU basketball team, she gets good grades, she dates a cute soccer player, and she tries to help out at home. Not like her older sister, Carla, who leaves her three-year-old daughter, Lulu, with Aunt Sadie while she parties and gets high. But when both sisters are caught up in a drug deal — wrong place, wrong time — it falls to Sadie to confess to a crime she didn’t commit to keep Carla out of jail and Lulu out of foster care. Sadie is supposed to get off with a slap on the wrist, but somehow, impossibly, gets sentenced to six months in juvie. As life as Sadie knew it disappears beyond the stark bars of her cell, her anger — at her ex-boyfriend, at Carla, and at herself — fills the empty space left behind. Can Sadie forgive Carla for getting her mixed up in this mess? Can Carla straighten herself out to make a better life for Lulu, and for all of them? Can Sadie survive her time in juvie with her spirit intact?

First Line(s): My three-year-old Niece, Lulu, sits alone at the kitchen table, eating a frozen waffle. It is early, barely sunrise, the day I have to turn myself into juvie.

Page 56: A minute later, Sunny Blond Girl has her arms deep in the trash, pulling out every Styrofoam box, every Dixie cup, every applesauce container, every Jell-O cup. She feels through the soggy leftovers that  spilled out and slid to the bottom of the trash bag. She starts crying. "I know it was right by me. I didn't do anything with it."