If you are looking for a great holiday story (that has nothing to do with New Years or crime but a lot to do with social injustice) with a fabulously happy ending, look no further than Memories Shrouded in Doubt in today's LA Times about two women, Regina Louise and Jeanne Kerr Taylor. I could not stop reading it, but clearly, I'm not alone. Not only is it today's most e-mailed article on the LA Times website, but yesterday, Regina Louise's 2003 memoir, Somebody's Someone, was #171,759 on Amazon. Today it is # 5,046. From a book review:

Regina Louise was poor, black, illegitimate, and abandoned by her mother to the care of an elderly woman, Big Mama, more concerned with getting to heaven than the health and welfare of her charge. Writing in the idiomatic voice of her childhood self, the author brings her fear, pain, stubbornness, and intelligence up close as she describes her struggles to find someone to love who will love her back. After a brutal beating at the hands of Big Mama's grown foster child, Regina is shuffled from one home to another, angry, uncooperative, vulnerable, finding solace first in fantasies that her mother will rescue her, then in the dream that she will be taken in by a family like those she sees on television.

It's supremely ironic that the woman who truly loves her happens to be white and is barred from fostering her. This is a harsh, often brutal, but always compelling memoir, and its very existence is proof of the author's personal triumph in the face of enormous odds.

Now read the LA Times' article for the happy ending, one that occurred after the book was published.