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The Inconvenient Child: An Abandoned Australian Child Struggles to Survive and Find her American Father
The Inconvenient Child An Abandoned Australian Child Struggles to Survive and Find her American Father Author:Sharyn Killens, Lindsay Lewis The true story of an abandoned Australian child's struggle to survive childhood and find her African American father.An unacceptable liaison, a secret birth, a mother's silence and her black child's journey to discover the truth... It is 1948, Sydney, Australia. Pretty, blond Grace discovers she is pregnant to a black mercha... more »nt marine who has sailed back to America. The White Australia Policy is in place and society's judgment matters; so what will Grace do with this baby? This is the true story of the inconvenient child. Rescued from neglectful foster care by an African American champion boxer, the baby is taken to live in a `party house' in Sydney's red light district of Kings Cross. Her absent, elegant mother then abandons Sharyn in a convent-orphanage, at age five, where she suffers abuse at the hands a cruel nun for the next seven years. By fifteen, discrimination within her family, resentment and clashes over her father's undisclosed identity see the troubled teenager running away to the streets of Kings Cross where she's arrested and sentenced to notorious 1960s juvenile detention centers where she is stripped of her dignity and programmed into submission. Sharyn's solace is her love of music but how can she realize her dream to become a singer if, by twenty-four, she is still caught up in the Kings Cross lifestyle? Determined to find her father, Sharyn sets out in search of her roots, a quest taking her across the world to Los Angels and New York and eventually to America's Deep South. But will she find the loving family and belonging she has yearned for all her life? About the Authors
Sharyn Killens and Lindsay Lewis have been close friends for twenty years and The Inconvenient Child is the result of their close collaboration.« less