Violet is Blue

Violet Sellers is blue, and for good reason. She's repressing a shocking secret she won't tell anyone, especially her comfortably middle-class parents. When she makes a new friend in school, Jules Marks, who lives on the other side of the tracks with his five little sisters, she is introduced to a dark world of self-abuse. As Violet learns about Jules and his shifty mother, Lee, she retreats further into her shell. Her parents, Gloria and Skip, are horrified and do their best to find out what happened to their adolescent daughter while bending over backward to keep the whole town from knowing their business. Jules has an aunt and uncle who know his desperate story, and they finally get a chance to free him and his sisters from a loveless world of poverty. Meanwhile, a spinster named Margaret Burns watches and waits. She knows all about redemption and she's got a master plan up her sleeve. Margaret and most of the quirky characters in Violet is Blue eventually learn to dance between the worlds of the haves and the have nots in ways none of them ever anticipated.