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The "mesmerizing . . . daring and important"* story of a risk-taking girlhood spent in a working-class prison town *Andre Dubus IIIFor Maureen Stanton's proper Catholic mother, the town's maximum security prison was a way to keep her seven children in line ("If you don't behave, I'll put you in Walpole Prison!") . But as the 1970s brought upheaval to America, and the lines between good and bad blurred, Stanton's once-solid family lost its way. A promising young girl with a smart mouth, Stanton turns watchful as her parents separate and her now-single mother descends into shoplifting, then grand larceny, anything to keep a toehold in the middle class for her children. No longer scared by threats of Walpole Prison, Stanton too slips into delinquency - vandalism, breaking and entering - all while nearly erasing herself through addiction to angel dust, a homemade form of PCP that swept through her hometown in the wake of Nixon's "total war" on drugs.Body Leaping Backward is the haunting and beautifully drawn story of a self-destructive girlhood, of a town and a nation overwhelmed in a time of change, and of how life-altering a glimpse of a world bigger than the one we come from can be.