The Golden Handle

Wendy's life has been anything but typical. Her father raped her on her sixth birthday, and yet she still lives in the same apartment in Manhattan with him, although he's become such an emotionless figure that she's hardly forced to communicate with him anyway. In fact, she's hardly as concerned with him as her mother, Stella. Dense, materialistic, and needy, Stella is more interested in living vicariously through her daughter than actually raising her. And Wendy knows it. After a particularly icy argument on her seventeenth birthday, Wendy bolts. She's not coming back.

The Golden Handle follows Wendy along through a week of sheer hell as she tries to find a sense of genuine happiness that she's lacked for eleven years, and Stella's desperate attempt to reconnect with her only daughter. But after a week laden with racism, murder, an apartment fire, kidnapping, and prostitution, will Wendy really be able to say it was worth it? Will Stella find a way to cope with her own rotten childhood and give her daughter the love she deserves? Does she even deserve a second chance?

Josh Berman grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles, where he currently maintains a part-time job at the local frozen yogurt shop while attending Chapman University, pursuing a double major in screenwriting and psychology. He has loved all forms of the written word since elementary school and dreams to one day publish work in as many different literary venues as possible. A cross between a hopeless romantic and a laid-back realist, Berman is particularly fascinated with unraveling the fragile enigma of what we call the "teenage mind."