Breaking Night - Liz Murray

Breaking Night - Liz Murray (2010) It has been a busy weekend, finishing two books over the weekend, a movie and a dvd. I feel a bit burnt out, but it was nice to curl up in my bed due to the autumn change of daylight savings and start my next book. At the moment with the evenings becoming longer I am delving into two or three books a week. I must have caught this story on Oprah or 20/20, as it seemed familiar and not quite as astonishing as the blurbs might suggest. Liz Murray, with her sister is living with her parents, both drug addicts in New York. With most of the welfare and drug dealing income going towards drugs, both girls are often left hungry and seldom cared for. They are left to fend for themselves and as a young teenager Liz is often truant, spending time with her friends. After finding herself homeless, she decides at seventeen that it is time to return to school, which she does while sleeping at friends places or on the subway trains or in the hallways of apartment buildings in New York. Completing four years of high school in two years, she then fights for a scholarship to Harvard. Her story was bandied about in the media, a movie made and now this memoir. It was sooo easy to see how she ended up slipping through the system, and how no one was looking out for Liz and her sister. Somehow the overwhelming feeling of this book left me feeling depressed and annoyed at the girls parents and how there was no adult intervention to help these girls. 2/5