The Beautiful-Ugly

What happens when you're six years old and the beautiful and loving world you woke up in is gone by nightfall?

What happens when that strange new world you've suddenly been dropped into is filled with a mind-numbing kaleidoscope of even stranger faces and surroundings as threatening as they are unfamiliar? When little Connelly Pierce and her nine-year-old brother Eric lose both their parents in an auto accident, everything they thought they knew and trusted disappears in a single gasp of breath. Forever. And from that moment of dark journey forward, they soon realize there is no turning back. As it also appears-months upon months passing by-there is likely no way out. And only when the well-meaning hands of government child protection agencies tear brother and sister apart, casting them both to opposite ends of that maddening potpourri of foster homes and drop-houses, does Connelly-ever maturing, ever changing from that once little girl into womanhood-fully understand what's really at stake: That if she ever wants to find Eric, and care for him, and try to have some semblance of the family that was taken from them, she must fight back. She must finally do only that which she wants and needs. She must fight for them both. Meanwhile, everyone and everything else that has told or shown them otherwise can go straight to hell. Still, there was one last thing for her to understand. To learn the hardest way possible. And that was that fighting an ever-changing, faceless and uncaring system was one thing. But running away from all that to fight the entire world, even with all her anger and rage, was something entirely different...