About This Book
Rosie Maloney grew up in the shadow of a mother who treated her children as burdens and bolted when the mood struck — leaving five kids, five different fathers, and a chaos that most people will never come close to understanding. When the family fractures and Rosie loses the one sibling who had always protected her, she faces what follows entirely on her own: foster care, instability, and a mother who resurfaces not to repair things but to make them worse. Co-written with her sister Regina Calcaterra, this is the story of what it costs to survive a childhood like that — and what it means to carry it into adulthood.
What distinguishes this book is the intimacy of two voices working together to reconstruct a shared wound from different vantage points. Rosie's perspective brings a rawness that Regina's earlier memoir couldn't fully reach — this is the youngest child's account, the one who saw everything last and lost the most. The prose stays close to the bone without performing grief, and the structure moves with the same urgency as the events it describes. Readers who connected with Etched in Sand will find this an emotionally coherent companion; those coming in fresh will find it stands entirely on its own.