How do you write a book about child abuse, negligent schools, a psychotic break, and Burning Man?
A Very Long Story is Ren Ster’s answer to that question.
As a mother, stepmother, volunteer, and employee, she witnessed the many ways adults bully one another and screw kids over in Silicon Valley schools. After a collection of people allowed her stepson’s mentally ill mother to abuse him and sabotage his education, the author lost her mind, threatened a social services professional with blackmail, pit a school community against ravers, met her soulmate, became a furry, and ran away to Portland, Oregon, to join the Burning Man circus.
Through anecdotes and episodes, Ren Ster describes the institutional apathy and hypocrisy that create, enable, and perpetuate academic failure, abuse, trauma, and mental illness.
Our schools’ biggest problem? Self-serving adults who refuse to collaborate.