Home Street Home

Home Street Home is a work of literary fiction about the homeless experience in Virginia Beach. Based on hard facts, both lived and observed, it is the reader's ticket for a virtual journey into a parallel universe that is increasingly easy for any of us to fall into these days. Home Street Home is the jeopardy story of one female character who experiences that fall. At 60, Ella Migliore, a gentle soul from a middle-class lifestyle, finds her security wiped out by the 2008 market crash. Long estranged from her nuclear family, she is thrown into the brutal world of homelessness. Bravely trying to make the best of a bad situation, she downplays the dangers until she learns firsthand just how vicious street life can be. Menaced by ex-cons at a free dining hall, drenched in Tidewater tornado-watch weather waiting to bed down on church steps, and terrified by lawless men in a homeless camp, she digs deep to find strength to carry on. The beautiful Virginia woodlands bring her solace, but are the rumors true about the man in fatigues who endlessly chops kindling behind her camp? Did he really kill two hiking buddies and get the charges reduced on a technicality? Is Hawk, the unfriendly housed man who claims to "run these woods" only joking when he says he'd like to throw some human livers on the grill? Her terrors are compounded when Ella is physically attacked by much younger campers while onlookers refuse to get involved. Her fear of being beaten to death drives her into the arms of a predator who takes control of her camp and her life. When he asks the unthinkable she escapes, only to battle the worst threat of all - the thirst for revenge that twists her soul as she plans violent reprisals against those who've bullied her. Because the law fails to punish her attackers, Ella is set to make some moves that will keep her in a life of jail cycling and give her permanent membership in the club of lost souls. Will she lose the fight with spiritual darkness? Will she spiral down to become just another bitter and hardened "street rat"? Readers are also introduced to Ella's friend, Blondie, who has been on the street for over two years. She is "one of the luckier ones," having escaped the cruel lifestyle's full impact thanks to a "street knight" whom she saw as her rescuer, sent by what she calls her Protective Power. Deeply in love with the problematic Gabriel, a knight blighted by his hustler's mentality, Blondie struggles between the resentment she retains toward those homeless who supported her rival throughout a romantic triangle, and her sacred promise three years earlier to become a worker among the homeless. The triangle was resolved more than a year ago. But red flags are waving. Is Gabriel still involved with the other woman? Circumstances inform the reader that Gabriel may indeed be two-timing Blondie again with the hot party girl, Cutie Doll.The story-line action moves at a tense clip against a backdrop of group scenes at "Jesus Meals", the shelter, "Clay House" and the Oceanfront library. Populated by a realistic mix of homeless types, these scenes paint a faithfully rendered portrait of a world the author knows well - warts and all.