“The Sabotage Café”
The reality of life may be filled with a number of troubled teenagers out there struggling with issues like substance abuse, depression, self-harm, and more. But fiction can encapsulate this reality of adolescents as well and reading about it can definitely bring a parent or a teenager to some helpful realizations. 
Writer Joshua Furst recently debuts as a novelist with his new book entitled “The Sabotage Café.” This 272 paged novel just recently had its book launching where copies were signed and excerpts were read by the author himself.

The novel tells a tale of a teen that runs away from home and the interplay between mother and daughter. The teen daughter is affected by her mother’s own wrong decisions when she was a teen, and because of this purposely follows in her mother’s footsteps in order to upset her. Sound familiar, parents? The tale also includes the involvement of teen gangs and violence. You may immediately think that by the description of the plot that this novel is told from the viewpoint of the teen. But the interesting aspect of this novel is the fact that it is told through the observation of the teenager’s mother. She herself can simultaneously provide insights coming from her own adolescence. This not only portrays the mother-daughter relationship to the reader but it also gives a peek into the parallelism between both of them as teen girls, years away from one another.

This is a good read for a parent dealing with a troubled teen whom they are having difficulty understanding. Because both the views of the mother and the daughter are depicted, this can help a parent peek into a teenager’s struggles with her own parents. Knowing about both sides is always good for any sort of healthy communication. The novel can be a good starting point for productive ideas about healthy communication between parent and teenager. One can even learn from the negative reactions of either parent or child and choose not to react in such ways.

Even just taken as a fictional read, this book can lead a reader back to one’s own inner struggles and inspire one to face them.

“Sabotage Café” is a novel about the relationship between mothers and teen daughters that can hit a nerve of emotion of a parent reading it or even a teenager as well.