Half Penny

Finalist! 2025 Next Generation Indie Book Awards, Women's Nonfiction

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5-Star Review from Reader's Favorite

Half Penny is a searing memoir about a girlhood shaped by secrecy, loss, and emotional captivity- and the woman who must return to the past to understand her life.

What begins as a daughter's attempt to lay her father to rest becomes an unexpected reckoning with buried memory: her mother's early death, a childhood abduction that was never explained, and a home where silence was treated as loyalty.

With clear, unsentimental prose, Lee examines the psychological cost of growing up inside dysfunction. Structured with quiet clues and narrative echoes that only reveal themselves with hindsight, Half Penny rewards a second reading, offering hidden connections and early warnings that take on new meaning once the truth is known.

Like Jenette McCurdy's I'm Glad My Mom Died, this is a story about how family damage and secrecy shape identity. And like Amy Griffin's The Tell, it explores what it takes to separate the story you were handed from the life that was built on a lie.

Perfect for readers who love:

True stories

Emotional and unforgettable narratives

Courageous accounts of resilience and survival.

Accessible stories