Growing up on welfare, food stamps, and Greyhound buses, Holly Thompson Rehder quit school at fifteen to help take care of her mother and younger sister after a devastating car accident. Getting married and pregnant soon thereafter, like so many other young girls caught in the poverty-cycle, Holly decided that the life she had been born into was not what she intended to give her child.

But unlike others who wind up mired in a lifetime of poverty, dysfunction, and despair, Holly used her resourcefulness, faith, and sheer stubborn American grit to fight her way out of the gutter.

Two decades later she was a successful businesswoman. And today, she is a rising political star who serves as an inspiration to young women across the state of Missouri--and indeed, the entire nation--all while never forgetting where she came from. She worked her butt off to help so many others born into seemingly helpless circumstances.

As a rare lawmaker who speaks candidly from raw personal experience, in Cinder Girl, Rehder rises above standard political prose to provide an unvarnished look inside the worst of American poverty--those living in the margins. Rehder challenges us to recall the plight of those far less fortunate, who struggle without the opportunities most of us take for granted.