Overview

At six years old, Michelle was given up - and her childhood fractured without warning. Where Grace Lives is a grassroots coming-of-age memoir that follows a young girl growing up in Atlantic Canada after the sudden loss of home, family, and safety. Told through the eyes of the child she was, the story unfolds across foster homes and small communities, where adults hold power, questions go unanswered, and silence becomes a way of surviving. After the death of her father at the age of three and a house fire that leaves her family displaced, Michelle is taken from the home and life she knows. She is sent from the city into unfamiliar rural worlds - moving through different houses, foster homes, group settings, working farms, and eventually the streets - believing it is temporary, believing her mother will come back for her. What follows is a childhood shaped by waiting, watching, and trying to understand why the rescue never comes. Told from a child's innocence and early wonderment, Where Grace Lives stays close to lived moments where a girl is quietly trying to understand what is happening to her - why she is sent away, why no one explains, why she doesn't seem to belong where other children do. She watches adults closely, waits to be chosen, and begins to wonder what she has done wrong. The story is set in small Atlantic Canadian communities, where weather, isolation, and closeness shape daily life - and silence is something you live with. Where Grace Lives is a coming-of-age story shaped by constant movement - from the city to rural homes, from family to strangers, from one place to the next - and by what a child learns as she adapts to survive each world she is sent into.

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9781069729323

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Author Information

Michelle L. Molinari is an educator at Nova Scotia Community College, where she teaches electrical motor controls, instrumentation, and automation. Drawing from her lived experience growing up in foster care, Where Grace Lives traces the journey from childhood displacement to education, voice, and survival. This is her first book.

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