Down the Yellow Brick Road Book

Have you ever gone all the way to the back of Sunset magazine, past the pages of pages of "Must Take" vacations and patio makeovers that cost more than I made in my first ten years of teaching--only to reach the back page ads and realize there is irony in paradise. Because this entire magazine, or at least the full features section, is bank-rolled by ads for wilderness camps where people who's been turning the 1500 unused feet of their cabin into an artist's loft or whipping up a bouillabaise of geoduck and crawdads can send their kids to dry out and get clean.

Anyway, a long preface to say that my friend Ellie is NOT one of those people, but she did have a daughter who was drinking herself to death and she did take her against a will to a ranch in Montana where she left her for over a year with a woman named Fay who could cure anyone of anything. THEN she wrote about it and THEN she had the courage to publish it. Kudos for Ellie. It's a beautiful book and a must-read for anyone brave or foolish enough to consider parenting a teenager in the 21st century.