Review by Booklist Review
Sitting on the brand-new couch her roommate's in her shared studio apartment in Manhattan, Helen gets a call from her Uncle Geoff. (She has an Uncle Geoff?) Her younger brother has died; he killed himself. Her adoptive parents aren't expecting her she's missed years' worth of holidays at this point but she decides to go back to her suburban Milwaukee home and attend the funeral, for their sake. Why did her brother, also adopted, she never forgets to add, though from a different Korean family, take his own life? Helen launches an investigation, and as she examines the past and ambles through her home and town in search of clues, we see in her actions and others' responses that she's unhinged, perhaps ill, or at the very least unreliable, despite the nickname Sister Reliability she earned as a caretaker of troubled youth back in New York (a job her family shakes their heads over). Helen's foggy view of reality is a dark, dark comedic well, and debut novelist Cottrell tells her story with gutsy style, glowing sentences, and true feeling.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Cottrell's stellar debut novel, 32-year-old Helen is in her Manhattan apartment when she receives a call that her adoptive brother has killed himself. Helen, who like her brother is Korean and was adopted by the same white Milwaukee couple, is shaken by the news and books a one-way ticket to Milwaukee to find out what happened. But what starts as a detective's hunt for clues soon becomes Helen's confrontation of her own place in the world-why she's estranged from her past (she hasn't seen her adoptive parents in five years), and what she is doing with her life as a counselor for troubled youth. Finally, Helen comes to terms with her adoptive brother's suicide. The real attraction here is Helen: her perspective ranges from sharp (New York is "a city so rich it funds poetry") to askew ("People who call themselves photographers are fake... the real charlatans of our time. Behind a photo is a perfectly fake person, scrubbed of all flaws, dead inside") to unhinged (her adoptive parents' grieving takes the physical form of a middle-aged European man who walks around the house and helps himself to pizza). Cottrell gives Helen the impossible task of understanding what would drive another person to suicide, and the result is complex and mysterious, yet, in the end, deeply human and empathetic. Agent: Kate Johnson, Wolf Literary. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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Review by Library Journal Review
[DEBUT] In this distinctive debut, as unsettling as it is darkly funny, Helen Moran is shattered by the suicide of her adoptive brother, Korean-born like herself, and flies home to Milwaukee to discover what happened. She's long been estranged from her white parents, whose perception of her cultural heritage doesn't extend beyond ornamental chopsticks, and works in New York with troubled youth who call her Sister Reliability. Helen prides herself on behaving ethically and explains her actions in earnest, off-kilter, unintentionally witty language: to her adoptive parents, as she pointedly calls them, she says, "I'm here to look into the abyss and to offer my support in whatever form it takes." It's clear that Helen has been skirting the abyss for some time and that she and her brother struggled with the dissociation of being Korean (not Chinese) in an insular society. Yet the book deals more with her coming to realize that she hadn't entirely listened to her brother and that his final act was meant as both a noble gesture and his one assertive act. "TO LIVE AND LIVE ON," she ends up shouting, summing up the real issue at stake. Verdict A sharp, fresh voice that draws readers in; for most fiction readers.-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
