This book is heart wrenching. My grandmother was at the same orphanage as Helen, but only there for a short time, and as I have learned more about my grandmothers family, reading this book, I felt like I was just reading my grandmothers life.
How Helen came out of the tunnel, and became a better person, is quite an amazing thing.

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Fiction has nothing on truth, as this book proves. If you are ever feeling poor or feeling down and overwhelmed with life in general, just read this book. It's a wake up call. It's really very interesting to read of Helen Bower's life in the 1920's to the present day.

Helen was born the 3rd child of five in 1922 in Waseca, Minnesota. Her mother and father were poor and were definitely not very responsible when it came to caring for their children. Her parents would leave her and her siblings alone for weeks at a time. Needless to say the children didn't have much to eat and would eat raw potatoes as that was the only food they could find when their parents were gone. She and her siblings were sent to Minnesota State Public School for Dependent and Neglected Children in Owatonna.

After enduring verbal and mental abuse in the orphanage, she marries a physically and mentally abusive man. She has children with serious health problems. Through it all she keeps her faith and finds happiness in the small things in her life.

Later in her life, proving that it's never too late to find happiness with a new man, her story goes on.

I couldn't put the book down, I found it very inspiring and very real. A must read!

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