about the strength that can come from loss and poverty, and the triumph that comes with facing each day with hope and laughter, no matter the odds against you."I never danced with my father, but I danced in his shed with his sawdust swirling around my bone-thin ankles. At the old age of eleven, I sound morbid, but Daddy is not dead, he has just abandoned us like his other four kids. Joe never divorced his legal wife, making my siblings and me bastards, and our mother a fool. Daddy is a bigamist, and my parent's marriage is a misdemeanor--but the only crime Joe ever really committed was leaving me."Carpenter Joe Vasquez always wanted to build his wife and kids a house with his very own hands, but sometimes a man has a dream that can rip a family apart.Joe's family was dysfunctional because of him. Yet, Belinda's siblings inherited his musical gifts and she his talent for math and telling stories. As Joe spiraled deeper into alcoholism and had difficulty holding down a job, his dream began to unravel.Eventually, with a sick, uneducated mother and a father who was mean when he was too often drunk and vanishing sometimes for weeks at time, the kids had to grow up fast, feed the family, pay the mortgage, and the utilities.From award-winning fiction author Belinda Vasquez Garcia (pen names Belinda Austin and B. Austin) comes another chapter in her stranger-than-fiction life, the funny, heart-warming, heart twisting, A House of Sticks.

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