Jenny’s teacher requires her students to do a year-long project, but she never expects something as moving as the daily journal that twelve-year-old Jenny turns in. Jenny and her father are homeless, and Jenny writes with blunt honesty about her situation and her efforts to hide it from her classmates. This novel offers a revealing look at homelessness that will inspire compassion in readers.
Jenny’s teacher has required her students to do a year-long project. Twelve-year-old Jenny decides to keep a daily journal, but her teacher never expected it to be the truly extraordinary document that Jenny turns in at the end of the school year.
At the beginning of the year, her mother leaves, and Jenny and her father are soon homeless. Father and daughter go through several stages of homelessness, first living in a car, then a self-storage unit, and later a bus. At each stage, Jenny writes of the difficulties and problems involved in being homeless.
Through it all, Jenny manages to keep up with her schoolwork. One of the warm safe havens for her is the library, where she can do her homework. But it’s a struggle to hide her homelessness, and Jenny has a difficult time participating in social events with her classmates because of it. She becomes friends at the beginning of the school year with a girl from a prosperous home, but that friendship dies as poverty and homelessness overtake Jenny. She is, however, befriended by a classmate who is homeless and parentless and who knows that Jenny is homeless as well. He introduces her and her father to life under a bridge amid the flowerbeds of a park and a babbling brook.
Throughout the course of the school year, Jenny and her father fight their way through problems, until they are presented with a unique opportunity to change their situation. This novel offers a revealing look at homelessness that will inspire compassion and empathy in readers of all ages.
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