3.5 stars rounded up to 4.
Many thanks to NetGalley and Fernwood Publishing for this compelling book in return for an honest review.

It depicts the disenfranchised people living on the Halifax Streets, and provides the reader with the gritty reality of homelessness, being wet, tired, and cold on the city streets, searching for food in dumpsters behind restaurants and the accompanying stress of extreme poverty. We also learn about the poverty activists, drop-in centers providing meals, crowded shelters where beds are provided if one is lucky to be on the waiting list, and civil rights lawyers. Among the homeless are mentally ill, prostitutes, and people out of work and out of hope.

The main character is Lucy, a woman in her 60s who was once an anti-poverty activist and a teacher. She is now unstable, has a nasty temper, and rants publicly against capitalism destroying the economic livelihood of the poor at home and abroad. She worked amongst the poor in Guatemala and what happened there haunts her memory. Lucy is on probation and on medication for her mood swings. We first meet Lucy while she is trying to sleep under the bridge and is cold and wet. She is overweight, has arthritis accompanied by mobility issues. In one scene she hides in a filthy, reeking dumpster.

One day she is befriended by a young woman and meets her friends who are searching dumpsters for discarded food. Lucy has been sneaking into the basement of a lawyer, Judith, whom she regards as a friend because she has been an advocate for the troubled woman. She has a key to Judith’s home as she was permitted to store her few belongings there. She realizes she is breaking Judith’s trust, but the temptation of a warm dry place to sleep is too great. Soon the young people invade the basement as squatters.

I thought the book was well written and a learning experience. Her description of daily life on the streets, the hunger and dirt, and the will to survive was very well done, and the memorable characters were well developed in situations which seemed real. I found the first half of the book most compelling, and the later part where Lucy and others were squatters in Judith’s basement was not as strong as their situation on the streets. I wished the backstory of what happened in Guatemala had been revealed earlier in the story and felt Judith’s story was too drawn out.

Recommended for poverty advocates and anyone wanting an informative story about what it means to be down and out in Halifax and elsewhere. An enlightening and grim portrait of extreme poverty and the daily struggle to survive.