When her daughter Noelle\u2019s principal reports that April Soto\u2019s brilliant 10-year old \u201cbludgeoned\u201d a schoolmate, comparing her to a \u201crunaway freight train\u201d and mandating anger management for both mother and child, fiery rage breaks through April\u2019s years of effortful containment. That night, she runs. Though it ignited her ire to admit it, April\u2019s violence and her need to flee were generations in the making. She \u201cloathed having a cause and effect, being a single-source tragedy,\u201d but the \u201cwhite hot\u201d rage of the title\u2014her \u201cescape hatch\u201d and her \u201cbattery pack\u201d\u2014was triggered at age 5. After that, April\u2019s memories had been rife with \u201cskin I yanked, bone I smashed, hair I ripped in stripy bouquets.\u201d That incandescent veil shredded her peers\u2019 gendered expectations: \u201cYoung buls thinking they had a monopoly on rage till they saw me buy Boardwalk and put up a hotel.\u201d Forming the bulk of the novel, April relates these events in a book-length letter from mother to daughter to be read on Noelle\u2019s 18th birthday. By then April had been gone for eight years. When she left, April had been a 26-year-old former teen mother, a golden child turned dropout raising a gifted young girl in a house she shared with her mother and abuela. Chronicling where April went next and why, the letter is an emotionally raw explanation, not an excuse. April is ruthlessly honest, divulging family secrets and breaking a cycle of shame and sweeping things under the carpet. In blunt yet vibrantly lyrical prose, Hudes reveals the good, the bad, and the profane from April\u2019s brutally candid perspective\u2014including how April left Noelle without notice or plan with her abuela and great-grandmother first for 10 disastrous days and then returned briefly only to leave her for good in the care of a father and stepmother she had never known to save them both. It\u2019s a profound journey of the soul.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When her daughter Noelle\u2019s principal reports that April Soto\u2019s brilliant 10-year old \u201cbludgeoned\u201d a schoolmate, comparing her to a \u201crunaway freight train\u201d and mandating anger management for both mother and child, fiery rage breaks through April\u2019s years of effortful containment. That night, she runs. Though it ignited her ire to admit it, April\u2019s violence and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":4826,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4825"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4825\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}