When She Was Good

Norma Fox Mazer’s remarkable story of two sisters fighting to survive against a world without caring, reissued in a 10th anniversary paperback edition, to coincide with Mazer’s new novel in hardcover.

In the sad, shabby trailer where Em Thurkill lived her first fourteen years, suffering her father’s alcoholic rages and her mother’s deathly silence, and in the three she lived trapped with her violent, unstable sister, there seems more than enough to end even the dream of hope.

Yet Em Thurkill’s story is a story of how hope outlives brutality. It is a story of one girl’s sweetness, and almost unbearable pain. Heartbreaking, mesmerizing, and ultimately transcendent, this novel is a tribute to the astonishing resilience of the human soul.