The house on Mary Street, Carson City, Nevada is the only place five-year-old Jennifer Lauck will ever call home. It's where the sky is deep blue, forever blue, and there are almost never any clouds up there. It's where Jennifer lives with her older brother B.J., her father and mother, and their two cats Moshe and Diane. It should be a perfect, peaceful childhood - but Jennifer's mother is ill, very ill, and a childhood is the last thing Jennifer is going to be allowed ...With the startling emotional immediacy of a fractured photo album, Jennifer Lauck's incandescent memoir is the story of an ordinary girl growing up in the late 1970s - and the extraordinary circumstances of a childhood lost. As Jennifer moves from Nevada to Hermosa Beach, California, from Palo Alto to Los Angeles we witness a child coping with things she shouldn't have to cope with. But what shines through BLACKBIRD is an unbreakable spirit and a sense of survival that is both profoundly moving and deeply inspiring.