THE FAMILY SNITCH: A Daughter’s Memoir of Truth and Lies, or "how to reintegrate after surviving a toxic system"

THE FAMILY SNITCH: A Daughter’s Memoir of Truth and Lies
FRANCESCA FONTANA
Steerforth Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A journalist’s relentless, unsparing interrogation of family ties, the ways we deceive ourselves and others, and how we live with what we’ve done

A stunning debut, perfect for fans of Nicole Chung, Ashley C. Ford, and David Carr's The Night of the Gun

Francesca's parents represented opposing world-views. Her mother always slid her way out of questions about the past, saying only “My life started when you were born.” Her dad, an absent bodybuilder, loved telling stories about his seemingly larger-than-life past. He said he would tell her anything she wanted to know. But more often than not, it was a total lie. When Francesa was 9, he went to prison, and her mother, the grounding center of Francesca's world, moved her half a continent away...

The Family Snitch started as a youthful experiment in journalistic investigation. Francesca began to uncover her father's secret criminal past. But in her increasingly dogged pursuit of the truth at any cost, was she just selling everybody out?

In her thought-provoking exploration, Francesca also interrogates her own relationship to the truth, finding that she trusts almost no one and refuses to believe anything that can’t be backed by hard evidence. She turns to experts on memory and psychology, in search of someone to help explain the secrets kept between parents and children, and the inheritances they leave us in the fallout of their choices. She pulls on the threads that lead her back through the forms that came before this theater and film, Greek tragedy and myth.

The result is a page-turning memoir that is also an artful work of literature with enduring appeal.

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My Review: Confronting your past is a big part of the job of growing up. Learning the realities of your origins can be discomfiting. Myths that take root are rooted in misunderstandings, lies believed, facts spun...it's astounding how much looking for official records can teach you. If, of course, you know where to look...and that the records exist. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, after all.

Frankie, as the author chooses to be known in the book, grows up in a very troubled system. Her family is riven by silent elisions, careful misdirections; she comes to develop a full-blown case of OCD that becomes the giant power source for her journalism. Talk about making lemonade from life's lemons!

Lemonade is sour under the sweet, though. I read this book thinking how much expectation Frankie was leaving aside as she told this brutally painful story of the betrayal she felt as she discovered how little truth there was in her family in a reportorial style. Most memoir readers...I think we're past the peak of the memoir craze, it's solidified into a market with expectations...want to experience catharsis, weep buckets, feel the hollow burn of referred rage...not really available here. I thought Frankie's choice to narrate events was more affecting for its restraint. I'm not necessarily going to resonate to messy, splashy, look-at-me pyrotechnics. It's true the narrative switches from first to third person at seemingly unprompted intervals, but I came to realize this was Frankie's way of inserting her self into the narrative at the times it felt safe to her to do so.

For me, then, realizing the roots of Frankie's control in her demonstrated inability to trust anything or anyone in her family of origin made her decision to write the story at all an act of generous-spirited bravery, so the relatively matter-of-fact prose heightened my own experience of the read. It won't be to everyone's taste but I'd encourage you to look at the actual details before dismissing the style: A big, warm, largely absent daddy who tells you "anything you want to know" but in such a self-aggrandizing tone even your kid-self wonders, a mother who's a fogbank, impossible to pin down, so evasive she tells you the reason she's alive at all is you.

No pressure, child, just know your mother's *entire*life*is*your*reponsibility.

How Frankie made it to adulthood and used the gargantuan burdens heaped on her to become Author Fontana is astonishing. By rights no one would criticize her if she just huddled in a corner gibbering quietly to herself to try to make sense of her life. Instead we got this remarkable account of facing up to a past rife with stressors, replete with bad parenting, and lived in an unshareable bubble. How many friends do you have who could hang with you as you process your father's criminal history?

It's the main story, of course. Frankie has, that bloody OCD demands it, to dig in and determine the facts at last. What happened, when, who did he harm, why was it done. I'm always just a bit squicked out by true-crime entertainment. The victim (if alive) realizing strangers are judging them, harshly or not, is...distressing...to me; the family of the perpetrator likewise. It's both justice (if legal results are obtained) and not, re-experiencing traumas and having them made public property. Ask a writer who's had a really bad review how it affects one's emotional well-being to be exposed to every irritating twidgee with a keyboard and an opinion. Now blow it up ten times because it's not anything you asked for.

So I'm in two minds. Brava to Frankie for doing the work; has Author Fontana really thought this through? I dunno, nothing in the story or the later discussions tells me. I don't know how that would be accomplished without *major* spoilers; I get why it isn't done, but it leaves me ambivalent about the story's purpose not necessarily being one I can get all the way behind. Missing star thus explained.

I've seen many indifferent-to-poor memoirs burn up the sales charts. I'd like to see this brave, kind, generous soul join them. She deserves the worldly success.

DEATH WRITES, sixth Ben O'Keeffe/Inishowen Mysteries book

DEATH WRITES
ANDREA CARTER (Inishowen Mysteries #6)
Oceanview Publishing
$27.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A local author dies on stage at a literary festival. Ben O'Keeffe has to sort through his complicated estate—and find his murderer while she's at it.

Solicitor Benedicta “ Ben” O' Keeffe and her boyfriend Police Sergeant Tom Molloy race to Dublin after hearing that some strangers had moved in with Ben's parents. When they arrive, only Ben's parents and their strange lodger remain, but come morning the lodger has left. Not wanting to leave them alone, Ben persuades her parents to come and stay with her in Inishowen.

In Glendara, preparations are underway for Glenfest, Glendara's literary festival. Phyllis Kettle, the local bookshop owner, is especially pleased to have persuaded Gavin Featherstone, the local best-selling recluse writer, to take part.

The festival begins, and an eager crowd awaits Featherstone's appearance on stage. He is unexpectedly engaging, but when he stands to read from his new book, he stumbles and keels over on the platform.

Ben discovers that she holds Featherstone's will at the office, drafted by her predecessor. Soon, she's drawn into a complicated legal wrangle over the man's estate involving his family and the assistant who lived with him.

But nothing can yet be resolved, as a killer cannot inherit from their victim—and Gavin Featherstone's death was a murder.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Workaholics Ben and Tom, two of Glendara's few residents, are on the trail of murder and gaslighting and elder abuse this time. I know the publisher insists these can be read as stand-alones, but they shouldn't be; there's too much texture in this weave to be fully experiencedin one small patch. That said, starting here won't leave you befuddled and confused. Just feeling like you're missing something, because you are.

The family dramas in this entry in the series are parallel: Reclusive writer in the clutches of manipulative "assistant" (about whom there is A Mystery) makes a bookend for Ben's parents' mysterious, controlling-in-a-quiet-way "lodger" (about whom there is No Mystery); the fact is, I see things like these plots delineate a lot here in my assisted living facility on a much lower-stakes scale. I was completely wrapped up in this story, these stories really, from giddy-up to whoa. The issues couldn't be more timely: using the loneliness and vulnerability of the older people who steadily make up more and more of the population for material gain. I really fail to see the problem, as I suspect I'm supposed to, in the case of a caretaker benefiting from the cared-for person's generosity. The less unclear issue is the dreadful misuse of the grief felt by parents whose children have died. This is truly beyond the pale to my mind, to manipulate these miserable, bereft souls for profit.

The stories are very much up to Author Carter's standards of immersiveness and detail-oriented storytelling. There are clues everywhere, and they aren't there by accident despite appearances (well done you, Author Carter!). What you got before, you'll get again, along with Ben and Tom doing their awkward best to screw up their relationship. The Garda are doing their bit, with Tom being promoted away from Glendara again, maybe. These two are very well-suited but they're also rubbish at relationships. In Ben's case, it's old traumas that lots and lots of therapy (which she isn't seeking) would be pressed hard to reduce the symptoms of; in Tom's, he's an Irish man (see previous parenthetical).

This being the sort of real-life drama that makes the factually very unusual occurrence of murder slide down easier. Very few of us ever come into contact with murder, but all of us relate experientially to relationship angst. The side characters, like this book's featured person Phyllis the bookshop owner, are more than props. The reason to read the series in order is exactly so that Phyllis will be building on her previous life, not just doing her bit for the plot of this story by arranging the book festival that we've never heard of before. That kind of grace note, that Phyllis is very much the kind of organizing, managing, busybusybusy person who absolutely *would* arrange a book festival, get national attention for it, and somehow also land up with a murder case during it, and your credulity would not feel even the slightest strain. The good people of Glendara, on the Inishowen peninsula, in the far north of the Republic of Ireland, are presented to us over the course of six books and counting, ready to enfold our attention and reward it with just the right level of domestic drama.

THE VILLA, subtle, fun, and in the end, more than it says on the tin

THE VILLA
RACHEL HAWKINS
St. Martin' s Press
$28.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

NOW $2.99 on KINDLE

The Publisher Says: The bestselling author of The Wife Upstairs returns with a brilliant new gothic suspense set at an Italian villa with a dark history.

As kids, Emily and Chess were inseparable. But by their 30s, their bond has been strained by the demands of their adult lives. So when Chess suggests a girls trip to Italy, Emily jumps at the chance to reconnect with her best friend.

Villa Aestas in Orvieto is a high-end holiday home now, but in 1974, it was known as Villa Rosato, and rented for the summer by a notorious rock star, Noel Gordon. In an attempt to reignite his creative spark, Noel invites up-and-coming musician, Pierce Sheldon to join him, as well as Pierce’s girlfriend, Mari, and her stepsister, Lara. But he also sets in motion a chain of events that leads to Mari writing one of the greatest horror novels of all time, Lara composing a platinum album—and ends in Pierce’s brutal murder.

As Emily digs into the villa’s complicated history, she begins to think there might be more to the story of that fateful summer in 1974. That perhaps Pierce’s murder wasn’t just a tale of sex, drugs, and rock & roll gone wrong, but that something more sinister might have occurred—and that there might be clues hidden in the now-iconic works that Mari and Lara left behind.

Yet the closer that Emily gets to the truth, the more tension she feels developing between her and Chess. As secrets from the past come to light, equally dangerous betrayals from the present also emerge—and it begins to look like the villa will claim another victim before the summer ends.

Inspired by Fleetwood Mac, the Manson murders, and the infamous summer Percy and Mary Shelley spent with Lord Byron at a Lake Geneva castle—the birthplace of Frankenstein—The Villa welcomes you into its deadly legacy.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: What fun it is to sit, or lie in bed, with a read leaning/sitting/suspended above you by your boytoy at your preferred angle, and just submerge into a story. It must needs be a hefty stew, a thick and savory amalgam of tastes powerful and subtle, to get through the fog of quotidian tedium we're all settling back into in the wintry northern hemisphere. Remember it for August reading, global southerners!

Rachel Hawkins delivers a big, full bowl of it all. The middle-escent quondam besties who, in the present, are surprising themselves when they decide to spend girl-time together at one of those fabulously gorgeous rentable family seats in gloriously scenic Italy. Each woman, trying to gin up something to fulfill a publishing contract, is finding that she just is not feeling the love for anything she's got at that moment. The mystery writer's cozy series is sour for her now that her soon-to-be-ex husband is suing her for a chunk of her future royalties because she, in a moment of candor, told an interviewer that her series' most beloved character was based on him. The self-help writer's having an existential crisis because she's been fleecing desperate people by ladling out craptastic nostrums knowing full well that a trip to the Hallmark card shop would give them the same level of help and insight into their problems.

Oh dear! Silly me, saying what I really think about things again. Strike that! Of course, she's simply seeking something to afford her fresh insights and, well, what better than a friend in the middle of a rancorous divorce? (I don't in all honesty see how that's better but I'm not here to judge.) (Well, only the story I'm being told, not the realities of publishing.)

Em and Chess, in the present day, are going through the middle-escent crisis of "is this it?" and need to make their eyes see past the same-old same-old surfaces. At their gorgeous holiday Villa Aestas, they learn to listen to themselves more carefully as the delicious herbal remedy of being in Italy brings up things neither was ever planning to work through, or even acknowledge...admit. That stew has tough cuts of meat that just about break your jaw muscles to chew....

Their motivation to do that tough work is the fifty-years-gone history of Villa Aestas. Golden-boy rocker, two teenaged girls in love with his fame and poetry, a Svengali older man...all of twenty-six!...who guides the group into a Byron-and-Shelley creative ferment that he uses to elicit full-body responses to the sexual tensions inevitable in this situation. Tell me how any writer of anything at all could resist poking this spiritual sore tooth! And the existence of a memoir-by-novel about it, telling a story so soppily romantic that you just know a teenager wrote it. Should they, and we, trust the story we're told here, the story in front of us? Emily, she of the murder-mystery instincts, doesn't seem to question Mari's published version of the 1974 events until present-day events make her think carefully for once in a long, foggy, unhappy time.

But writers, you know, writers aren't simple little souls ready to take dictation from their imaginary friends the voices. Writers (of murder mysteries, of books about changing your life) need to be ruthless and "kill their darlings." Success can breed jealousy as always, but so can a lifetime of coming up short when comparing yourself to someone else...and poets (as songwriters insist they are) are doubly susceptible to this. Add in a hefty libido and a sense of entitlement and, well....

What Author Hawkins does is not something unexpected. But what she accomplishes by bringing all the strands...the two parties visiting Villa Aestas and the book that Mari, the central voice in 1974's strands, writes...into one bundle is to scrape away the grease she's been applying to the ropes of the plot so they won't rub too hard together and weaken each other. The bare ropes of the meanings and emotions scrape and snarl and burn each other as they are suddenly and forcefully made to change the story's velocity and angle. No tangles, some fraying...I think Mari's book got just a hair (heh) more time in the spotlight than it merited...but supporting structure of the thriller parts of the story suspend their scenery and allow you to scrape your stew-bowl clean without feeling like you need to rush before it all comes crashing down. I heard some creaking from behind the scenes but, crucially, felt that this was not the ropes complaining as they got overworked in moving the parts. It was a quiet invitation from Author Hawkins to consider the thriller you've seen in its intended configuration and perspective.

And question if, just maybe, there had not been a last-minute change of plans, well laid to achieve one result, to achieve instead another result entirely.

This elevated a solid three-and-a-half stars entertainment to a four-star puzzle (despite some eye-rolling but period-appropriate homophobia). Definitely recommended to thriller fans and to the small corps of remaining lovers still thrilling to the wonderful Cary Grant did-he-or-didn't-he films of the 1940s.