Alcoholism

I recently read the book "Lush" by Natasha Friend is about a girl and her problems with coping with her father's alcoholism.  When I read this book, I thought a lot about how the issues reflected in this book are modeled in the outside world.  

I think being an alcoholic is a really complicated issue that effects a bunch of families around the world. Samantha has to learn how to deal with her father always being drunk and hiding it from her friends. She doesn't want her friends like Tracy, Vanessa, and Angie to know that her father how her father really is. Having someone so close to you have a serious problem must be really hard. And she can't even talk about it to her friends, which is really sad.  So, Samantha starts to write to this boy in high school about her problems. He really helps Samantha.

I think alcoholism is a serious social issue. Alcohol isn't the problem itself, but really its the abuse of alcohol. Once you start you cant stop and it can lead to things that are really dangerous. For example, domestic violence. You can do things that you really don't mean to do but you are drunk and you don't know what is happening. Some families suffer from violence because of alcohol. It's a very powerful thing. For example, in the book Samantha has a little brother named Luke. She is really protective of him but one day, they were home with their dad who was drunk. They were in the living room making a lot of noise when her dad came in and told them to be quiet. Luke is only three so he laughed. Then the dad hit him over the head with a beer bottle. It was an awful mistake what happened. And it was one of the awful side effects of being drunk.