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" This series of autobiographical essays from debut author Jessica Hendry Nelson hopscotches through time to offer a kaleidoscopic look at the way abuse resonates down through generations like a bell. In language that often reads more like poetry than prose, Nelson details her father&amp;#039;s alcoholism, her mother&amp;#039;s attempts to hold the family together, and her brother&amp;#039;s eventual descent into drugs and mental illness. It is a bleak and somewhat unrelenting account but one shot through with humor and hints of redemption, though nothing close to a happy ending.  Related: Intrigue and Mystery on the Jersey Shore Brutality crackles underneath every line. The book opens with a letter from Nelson to her brother that she wrote after he overdosed (he survived), which gives a vivid child&amp;#039;s-eye view of the various halfway houses, rehab centers, and prison courtyards where they visited their father while they were growing up, finding him among men who &amp;quot;look interrupted, rather than finished.&amp;quot; From there, Nelson&amp;#039;s essays wind through a childhood that left her so desperate to be hugged that she shakes &amp;quot;like a hooked fish&amp;quot; when someone holds her, and a drug-addled adolescence in which she spends night after night trying to obliterate herself, before cycling back to the beginning\u2014with her brother &amp;quot;a wretched shucked thing&amp;quot; in the hospital after an overdose. For much of the book, Nelson can&amp;#039;t seem to escape the orbit of her family&amp;#039;s dysfunction, but by the end she is ensconced in Vermont with a boyfriend, attempting to forge a life of her own away from &amp;quot;the theater of my brother&amp;#039;s addiction.&amp;quot; Nelson presents this as both a betrayal and an achievement, and the way she writes is so unflinchingly honest it leaves you able to understand that perhaps both can be equally true at once. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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