Remember all your problems when you were young? As if trying to fit in and be popular wasn't bad enough, there's also the seemingly unsupportive family and their problems too. Meet Hailey, who also had to go through all that while living in the slums, with a jobless dad and a depressed mother, as secret after secret were known to her or she has to cover some up of her own.

Pace wise, this is not a fast book, but neither is it slow. There are no real unexpected twists and turns in the book, except for one minor one - and even then it is not that unexpected considering this is a coming of age book. This is the age where one learns nothing is a bed of roses in life, and the metaphors at the end of each chapter never fails to remind the reader how dreams are broken, and can quite often turn out to be tragic.

Like real life, there are many questions in the book that goes unanswered. There's no happy ending, and from that point of view, it seems like a vicious cycle about to repeat itself.

I really like this book, despite the fact that it is not a genre I normally read. I am so used to multiple climatic moments in books and the few climatic moments in the book is nothing more than a mound on the ground. The characters are likeable, and many would emphatize with them. Various issues were explored, from underage sex, to rape and chain smoking. it is a pity that many of these issues couldn't be expressed in the limitations of the text.

~Ani~ ( )

I was really excited to read this book and wasn’t let down. It is about a teenage girl that grows up in the slums of New Orleans. You go through her struggles from being a teenager to her family. The book s very disturbing and I sometimes had to put it down for a little while before I could I could read it again. This is not for someone likes to look forward to a happy ending. ( )

This isn't usually the genre of book I read, but I selected it because it had a teenage protagonist and was a coming of age story. This book had sort of the same feel as 2008 Alex Award Winner "The God of Animals" by Aryn Kyle. If you enjoy slice-of-life stories with great dialog and unusual dialects about working class families, I'd suggest this book.

Considering how short the piece was, the book had a very nice leisurely pace. The dialog was written in a very thick dialect, but was very easy to follow. It also had a lyrical, almost poetic feel to it.

The characters are rich and colorful. They looked, sounded and felt like real people. While I didn't like all of them as people, I really liked reading about them. I felt like a peeping tom, snooping on the most intimate private moments of a family. This sounds weird, but even if nothing ever happened in the book, and the book were three times as long, I could have kept reading this great dialog and interesting characters.

The setting was gritty and dirty, but captivating. I don't know much at all about the backwoods of Louisiana, but I felt like the author transported me there and I saw it all. ( )

Dirty Little Angels is like a slightly overripe peach that you've dropped in the dirt accidentally. The dirt sticks, and there are bruises on top of bruises, but you want the sweetness, and you want to salvage what you can. There is despair and hell in this story, but somehow, in a twisted, roundabout way, there is hope and the possibility of salvation.

The main character, Hailey, takes a little while to develop into three dimensions. Once she does, though, her experiences come through powerfully, sometimes staggeringly so.

This book is a window into what so many young people live on a daily basis... makes one stop and think about the world we live in. ( )

From the start, Dirty Little Angels draws you in. Relating to the characters is easy and emotionally binding. You feel their pain and their confusion. You feel Hailey's need for her family to become more than they are for the sake of their sanity. She tries so hard throughout the story for her family to "fix" itself, that it's not until she falls apart does she realize they were "fixed" all along. Hailey's emotional ties to her family allows the reader to draw from their own personal experiences similar feelings. Even if your family doesn't need to be "fixed" in your mind, you can realte to Hailey and her family. It was a great read that kept me coming back for more. I wanted to continue to learn more about Cyrus and Hailey and Meredian and all of the characters. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone. ( )