Part of Series
What does it take to be a good mother? A good neighbor? Straight answers are hard to find in this keenly observed short story by New York Times bestselling author Janelle Brown. Polly’s fourth-grade daughter has been spending a lot of time with her classmate Sylvie—maybe too much. Sylvie’s clothes are a little…flashy…and her phone (a ten-year-old with a phone!) doesn’t seem to have any parental controls. It seems that Sylvie’s mother, with her vape pens and her too-high heels, may not be making good choices. As Polly tries to exert a positive influence, she discovers just how little anyone can tell about a family from the outside. Janelle Brown’s Trouble is part of We Could Be Heroes, a darkly inquisitive collection of short stories that examines heroic intentions versus their real-life consequences. Read or listen to each in a single sitting.
Author
Welcome to my home on Goodreads. A little about me: I'm the New York Times bestselling author of the novels PRETTY THINGS, WATCH ME DISAPPEAR, ALL WE EVER WANTED WAS EVERYTHING, THIS IS WHERE WE LIVE and the upcoming I'LL BE YOU. My books have been New York Times bestsellers and published in a dozen countries around the world. My books tend to be page-turners with dysfunctional family relationships at their hearts; while my first two books were more satirical domestic dramas, my latest three are literary suspense. I'm also very much a California writer, and my books are set across the state. I'm always happy to answer questions here, but you can also find me on Instagram and Twitter—and if you visit http://www.janellebrown.com you can also sign up for my newsletter. I've known I wanted to be a novelist ever since I was in first grade, when my teacher looked at the whimsical little books I liked to make (and the pile of books I checked out of the school library every week) and said that I could be an author when I grew up. I took her suggestion to heart. It took me several decades to get to novel-writing, though. I first started off as an essayist and journalist, writing for Wired and Salon in San Francisco, during the dotcom boom years. In the 1990’s, I was also the editor and co-founder of Maxi, an irreverent (and now, long-gone) women's pop culture magazine. My writing has also appeared in Vogue, The New York Times, Elle, Wired, Self, The Los Angeles Times, and numerous other publications. I've spent the fifteen years working on my novels, writing the occasional essay, and living in Los Angeles with my husband and two children.
