One Book One Broomfield 2027 Community Vote

The working homeless. In a country where hard work and determination are supposed to lead to success, there is something scandalous about this phrase. But skyrocketing rents, low wages, and a lack of tenant rights have produced a startling phenomenon: People with full-time jobs cannot keep a roof over their head, especially in America’s booming cities, where rapid growth is leading to catastrophic displacement. These families are being forced into homelessness not by a failing economy but a thriving one.

In this gripping and deeply reported Pulitzer Prize winning book, Brian Goldstone plunges readers into the lives of five Atlanta families struggling to remain housed in a gentrifying, increasingly unequal city.

The first thing you have to understand is that my father was my entire world. Growing up in an isolated cabin in Montana in the mid-1990s, Jane knows only the world that she and her father live in: the woodstove that heats their home, the vegetable garden where they try to eke out a subsistence, the books of nineteenth-century philosophy that her father gives her to read in lieu of going to school. Her father is elusive about their pasts, giving Jane little beyond the facts that they once lived in the Bay Area and that her mother died in a car accident, the crash propelling him to move Jane off the grid to raise her in a Waldenesque utopia.

In this sweeping, suspenseful novel from bestselling author Janelle Brown, we see a young woman on a quest to understand how we come to know ourselves. It is a bold and unforgettable story about parents and children; nature and technology; innocence and knowledge; the losses of our past and our dreams for the future.

With his long hair and penchant for guitar, teenage Justin is the spitting image of his idol, Kurt Cobain—a resemblance that has often marked him an outcast. When the long-simmering abuse from his uncle finally boils over, Justin has no choice but to break free, in a violent act that will haunt him, and try to make it on his own as a runaway.

Meanwhile, in rural Montana, Rene Bouchard, a rancher nearing retirement, grieves the recent death of his wife. Her passing has revealed precisely how fractured the family has become—particularly the relationship between Rene and his daughter, Lianne. As old wounds ache anew, father and daughter begin to doubt the possibility of reconciliation, even as they each privately yearn for it.

Justin’s wanderings bring him to the Bouchard family ranch, and soon Rene and Lianne take the boy in as their own. But before long, Justin’s past threatens to catch up with him, jeopardizing not only his new bond with Rene and Lianne but also the home he’s finally been able to claim.