Novelist McBride's memoir contains tragedy, alienation from family, a hospital stay, escape, even ghostly hallucinations. But the rapid back-and-forth between the teenager clawing her way forward after the deaths of her parents and childhood memories of her troubled family pull readers into her anguish. -McBride resists a linear narrative. She does not speculate expansively on her parents' inner lives, or ascribe meaning to others' actions. Her memories stand alone, giving the book an epistolary quality. VERDICT Compelling, beautifully told, and likely to stay with readers for a long time. Book groups will have much to discuss. (LJ 6/15/16)-Kate Sheehan © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

*Starred Review* By all measures, McBride (The Marriage Bed, 2004) suffered a difficult, nearly catastrophic childhood. Along with her siblings, she was at the center of a toxic familial whirlwind, subjected to alcohol-fueled bickering between their parents exacerbated by a difficult live-in grandmother who puts Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to shame. Opening in a psychiatric ward, McBride's lyrical memoir focuses on her eighteenth year and catalogs her struggle to rid herself of lingering pain from her parents' separate suicides within months of each other, and her own misplaced guilt over failing to somehow save them and adequately support her younger sisters. Moving back and forth in time, McBride ponders her memories of growing up and floundering into adulthood. Visited by ghosts she tries to deny, she embraces her heritage and travels to Ireland in search of a way to put her father's spirit to rest. She repeatedly returns to images and memories of her parents happy, furious, disappointed, and damaged. Clearly, no one came out of that household alive, not really, and this memoir of survival is even more about reinvention than reflecting on the past. Harrowing, sincere, and unforgettable.--Mondor, Colleen Copyright 2016 Booklist

This soul-wrenching memoir by novelist McBridge (The Land of Women) recounts the author's time in a psychiatric ward at age 18, after her parents' suicides, as she gets to know the other patients and copes with a flood of memories, both happy and sad, of her life before her parents' deaths. McBride's memoir contains lush details, but sometimes the multitude of memories overwhelms the narrative and takes away from the otherwise powerful depiction of a teenager understanding the complexity of newfound adult responsibility, poverty, and her parents' identity, while coming to terms with the trauma of loss and her encounters with the miraculous. McBride discusses how theater and a concerned acting teacher try to help Regina cope with these problems, but it is ultimately a visit to Ireland that helps her understand her feelings and become whole again. Agent: Ellen Levine and Alexa Stark, Trident Media Group. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.