This is in the YA category. Ultimately, it's rather sad because the ending leaves you hanging & you never know if Jane/Leshaya cleans up her act, & grows up to realize her dream of being a jazz/R & B singer, or whether she gets back on the drug merry go round she's been on. Given what she's already been through, her mother a heroin addict who had her removed & sent to a bad foster home, then kidnapped from the foster home by her mother on an unannounced visit & in essence, traded to her drug dealers for a free supply of her fix, where she was taken better care of then she was at the foster home, but ran away from when the couple was arrested for dealing & sent to prison, etc. She proved she could survive, & we are left hoping that through it all, she learned some lessons about herself that would make her a better person. ( )

I thought this was a really great book, but it has a bad ending. ( )

Janie, aka Leshaya, is a survivor; it is not as if she has any choice in the matter, since life keeps dealing her knockout blows. Born to a heroin-addicted mother, her childhood is spent in foster homes, passed around from person to person, few of whom take time to parent her. Her only salvation is music, for when she opens her mouth to sing, then and only then does Janie feel alive. Yet she looks everywhere for love: in food, in drugs, and always, always, falling in with the wrong man. Her mother kidnaps her, sells her for drugs, and yet somehow Janie keeps pushing on, sure that this is merely the hard road she must travel in order to find success. The book is told in first person with a heavy urban dialect. A tale of survival as gritty and harsh as any set in the wilderness. Review originally appeared in Novelist. ( )