Publisher's Synopsis
This is the Care Vortex, drawing you in, emotionally entangling you, leaving you no time for clear independent thought, no empty moments to objectively assess what you are doing to yourself and so you are unable to extricate yourself. All mental effort, all affection, all resentment, all loyalties are thrown into the vortex, to circle like flotsam on the wreckage of all those lives, helped and helpers. The Care Vortex follows a group of teenage-girls in a penny-pinching, privately-owned care home. Care workers and inmates (for that is how they feel), must deal with child prostitution, drug addiction, self-mutilation, incest, violence and crime. All this within a home run by ineptitude, indifference and greed. Sam Smith exposes the system as only someone who has worked in the environment can. His characters are starkly real, fleshed out by their words and deeds, but also by their case histories. This is an irresistible, disturbing reality check.
