This is a true story. The author is “Jacky” in the book. This is a daughter’s moving tribute to her mother - but it is also a daughter’s quest to resolve her own personal demons, and in this she is supported by her own daughter. A strong bloodline thread runs through this book, linking the female family relationships across the generations. The author begins her mother’s story in 1951 at Pilgrim State, a mental hospital in New York State where she has been forcibly sectioned. Dorothy Walker, a black single mother, will spend the rest of her life struggling to retain both her sanity and the custody of her children, and this poignant memoir documents that struggle in the most personal of ways. The story spans New York, Kingston Jamaica, Canada and London and serves as a powerful socio-economic record of the challenges and attitudes of the 1950s and 1960s. It is beautifully written – in places almost poetic in style, and in direct contrast to the clinical brevity of the extracts from go