Best Seller
One Good Hustle
Ebook
Published on Jul 24, 2012 | 288 Pages
From award-winning writer Billie Livingston, an unsparing novel of loyalty and survival that is fierce, sharp and funny even when it’s breaking your heart.
The child of two con artists, 16-year-old Sammie Bell always prided herself on knowing the score. But now she finds herself backed into a corner. After a hustle gone dangerously wrong, her mother, Marlene, is sliding into an abyss of alcoholic depression, spending her days fantasizing aloud about death—a goal Sammie is tempted to help her accomplish. Horrified by the appeal of this, Sammie packs a bag and leaves her mother to her own devices.
With her father missing in action, she has nowhere else to go but the home of a friend with two parents who seem to actually love their daughter and each other—and who awkwardly try to extend some semblance of family to Sammie. Throughout a long summer of crisis among the normals, Sammie is torn between her longing for the approval of the con-man father she was named for and her desire for the “weird, spearmint-fresh feeling” of life in the straight world. Sammie wants to be normal but fears that where she comes from makes that beyond the realm of possibility.
One Good Hustle chronicles two months in Sammie Bell’s struggle with her dread that she is somehow doomed genetically to be just another hustler.
The child of two con artists, 16-year-old Sammie Bell always prided herself on knowing the score. But now she finds herself backed into a corner. After a hustle gone dangerously wrong, her mother, Marlene, is sliding into an abyss of alcoholic depression, spending her days fantasizing aloud about death—a goal Sammie is tempted to help her accomplish. Horrified by the appeal of this, Sammie packs a bag and leaves her mother to her own devices.
With her father missing in action, she has nowhere else to go but the home of a friend with two parents who seem to actually love their daughter and each other—and who awkwardly try to extend some semblance of family to Sammie. Throughout a long summer of crisis among the normals, Sammie is torn between her longing for the approval of the con-man father she was named for and her desire for the “weird, spearmint-fresh feeling” of life in the straight world. Sammie wants to be normal but fears that where she comes from makes that beyond the realm of possibility.
One Good Hustle chronicles two months in Sammie Bell’s struggle with her dread that she is somehow doomed genetically to be just another hustler.
Author
Billie Livingston
BILLIE LIVINGSTON is the author of three novels, short stories, including the Danuta Gleed and CBC Bookie award-winning collection Greedy Little Eyes, and poetry. Her previous novel, One Good Hustle, a Globe and Mail Best Book, was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and nominated for the Canadian Library Association’s Young Adult Book Award. Her short story, “Sitting on the Edge of Marlene,” has been adapted as a feature film. She lives in Vancouver. The author lives in Vancouver, BC.
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