
The Dark Side of Joy
An abandoned child struggles to survive living on the streets of Whiskey Gulch.
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Narrated by:
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Virtual Voice
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By:
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Ken Barrett

This title uses virtual voice narration
About this listen
A story of survival…
Twelve-year-old Alan Smith had everything going for him; he was athletic, popular, and excelled scholastically. The only problem was that his parents were criminals. The lies he was forced to tell to protect his parents isolated him; his entire life was based on deception.
On April 23, 1967, the lies ended. That night, the police kicked in the door to his home and took his parents away. With that, every relationship in his life fell apart. His extended family abandoned him out of shame, and friendships based on dishonesty crumbled and collapsed. Alan soon found himself homeless and alone.
What follows is an odyssey of the human spirit. Alan will learn to survive juvenile detention, foster care, and finally life with other lost children selling drugs on the street for an outlaw biker gang. As he struggles to cope within increasingly hostile environments, dealing with abandonment, murder, mindless violence, and extreme brutality, he adapts, evolves, and in the end, becomes someone new.
Alan finds hope amid all this suffering when he meets Swan, his first true love. It is through this romance that Alan learns the greatest and most difficult lesson of all, that there is a dark side of joy.
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