Amos The End and the Beginning

Could you do it? Could you live, day after day, in a city this violent, this broken? Could you lie, steal, and hide to stay alive? Could you hurt someone to protect the one person you have left? Fourteen-year-old Amos doesn't have the answers. The economy collapsed years ago and almost took the country down with it, and he's resourceful enough to survive Boston's streets alone  but only just, and only for so long. Then he meets Alanah, a hot-headed girl as stubborn and capable as he is, and together they carve out a hidden life that almost passes for normal. But surviving the streets is only half the fight. The other half is staying who you are while you do it:  while you deceive, and rob, and hurt people to make it to the next day. Then Amos crosses the wrong person: an old-world matriarch with a strict code of family honour and a gift for a much older, darker kind of power. When he bloodies her grandson, she doesn't send men. She sends a curse, one that slowly eats away at who Amos is. Cornered and running out of time, Amos and Alanah are pushed toward choices they'll carry for the rest of their lives.