This is a very interesting book. I couldn’t begin to guess what genre you would put this into or how to describe it. The writing is very well done and I could picture things perfectly. I could even smell the brine-y air of the sea and feel the loneliness and desperation of Hawley.
I didn’t connect with the characters in an I-can-understand-what-they-are-going-through way but I did like Loo and even Hawley. I knew something terrible must have happened to Sam in order for him to force himself and Loo to live their lives like they did. I feel very sorry for Loo having to live this restless life and not really knowing why and seeing how it affected her relationships or lack thereof.
I am not sure how I feel about the ending and since I don’t like spoilers…just FYI: if you like your endings neat and tidy and all wrapped up, you might not be happy.

"These things we do that others may live."

This book was such a nice read. I really enjoyed the characters of Samuel and Loo. Samuel Hawley is the main characater and has lived a life of crime, danger, and adventure. He has many bullet wounds and we learn the story behind each one as we continue reading. Loo is his daughter and in the present day she is a teenager and living with Samuel. The story goes back and forth between Samuel’s past and Loo’s present. Their stories even overlap at some points. I don’t want to give much away but the book starts off with lots of excitement and it never let’s up. It’s so thrilling and there is something crazy happening in just about each chapter. I loved how it all unfolded and am so glad I decided to pick this up. I will say it’s a real Heartbreakers but one heck of a story.

It was released yesterday and is available for purchase now! Go get it! I give it a 4/5 stars. I graciously received an ARC of this book from NetGalley but my opinions are my own.

The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley completely mesmerized me from start to finish. I was drawn to this title because of the father-daughter story, being a self-proclaimed Daddy’s girl myself, but this novel’s main focus is telling the story of Sam Hawley. Sam is raising his daughter, Loo, alone after his wife Lily drowned when Loo was a baby. Sam and Loo have been on the run going from place to place for years until Sam decides to return to Lily’s hometown and raise Loo in one place – and try to provide her with a “normal” life. The chapters of the novel fluctuate being past and present telling both the story of Sam and Loo, as well as, flashing back to reveal Sam’s past and how he received each of his 12 bullet scars on his body.

Loo was raised around a ton of guns and taught to shoot when she was a young girl. Not only was she raised around weapons, she was also taught how to pack up what’s needed and be on the road in a moments notice until they finally return to Olympus. Loo struggles making and keeping friends and is often bullied until she decides to fight back, resulting in Loo acting a lot of anger and frustration during her adolescence. But she was also brilliant and graduated high school at 16. Loo reconnects with her maternal grandmother, Mabel, after returning to Olympus and begins to learn secrets about her mother and father’s past, as well as, her own.

Sam is a quiet and stern man with a primary focus of raising and protecting his daughter, however, he is also stuck in the past. No matter how often they picked up and moved from hotel to hotel, apartments, and so on, Sam always recreated a shrine of sorts to Lily, by filling the bathroom with her toiletries, cosmetics, pictures, or notes that she had written. As the novel unfolds the reader gets a glimpse into Sam’s past which explains the situations in which he had been shot during his life, as well as, his own personal struggles involving right and wrong. I really loved the character of Sam. Don’t get me wrong, I am not supporting his criminal lifestyle or some things that Loo was taught or exposed to while growing up. But in spite of that, this was a man that loved his daughter more than anything and wanted nothing more for her to be safe, smart, and self-sufficient. Overall this novel was about immense and unyielding love.

Sometimes this story was funny, sometimes it was very violent, and sometimes it was extremely heart wrenching. Regardless of which emotions were evoked in me as I read, this story grabbed me and held on tight until it was finished. I must admit, I did yell out a few four-letter words after reading the last page, left startled and confused about the ending. However, the conversation with the author at the end cleared things up for me. I still didn’t like the ending, but understood it and why it worked.

Hannah Tinti’s writing and this incredible story about Sam and Loo is amazing. Her slow and methodic creation of Sam Hawley and how she developed it into this story demonstrates so much passion and creativity that it’s mind-boggling. I would highly recommend this novel to anyone, regardless of your typical genre preference. This is a story with rich and unique characters that you will still be thinking about long after finished reading.

*Thanks to NetGalley for providing a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

This book - it was one of my favorite reads this year. I absolutely fell in love with Loo and her father, Sam. I wanted to know everything about them. And this book delivered that as it proceeded to take me back and forth in time on an incredible journey. We get to know Sam and Loo through the scars on Sam's body and we also learn through those scars, the story of Loo's mother.

This was such a heartbreaking read and it still makes me incredibly sad when I think of all they went through to finally wind up back home and a place they finally feel they belong. It's quite a journey to that place though and I was so glad I was along for the ride. In addition to the sadness though, lest you think this is just a sad book, there was a lot of growth and such love written in every page so ultimately it was a joy filled book for me. And I will look back on my time with Loo and Sam with love and fondness. They were characters that have stolen my heart and I won't soon be forgetting them.

I highly recommend this book if you love quirky, lovely characters and a plot that keeps you turning pages as fast as you can. I loved every minute of my time spent in these pages.

“Everything breaks if you hit it hard enough.”

What would you do to protect those you love the most? Tinti’s epic father-daughter tale has already drawn accolades far and wide. What can I add to it all? There are only so many ways to say that someone is a genius and that her work deserves the highest praise and honors. I received my copy free and in advance, courtesy of Net Galley and Random House, in exchange for this honest review, and I’ve spent the last month trying to decide what I can add to the discussion. Although 2017 is clearly an outstanding year for literature, this title stands head and shoulders above everything else I’ve seen. It will likely be the best fiction published this year.

Our two protagonists are Samuel Hawley and his daughter, Loo. The story is arranged with alternate points of view, and also moves from present tense to the past, when Lily, Loo’s mother, was alive. Hawley is a career criminal, a man that has robbed and killed as part of a business transaction, but his tenderness for his daughter and his wife keep us connected to him.

As a parent, though, Hawley is kind of a mess. He does his best, teaching his daughter useful tasks like how to file the serial number off of a weapon and how to use it, but at the same time, he keeps his criminal business quiet and low, and she is nearly grown before she realizes what he actually does for a living. The two of them move around the country frequently, and they have a routine that gets them gone in a hurry when it’s necessary, but as she gets older he takes her to the Massachusetts town where her maternal grandmother lives. And I have to say, Mabel Ridge, Lily’s mother, is one of the most arresting side characters I have seen in a very long time.

For Loo’s sake, Hawley works as a fisherman and sets down roots. His participation in the Greasy Pole event, a cherished local tradition, wins him a place in the community. But he’s left enemies in his wake, and Hawley is constantly alert to the threat others pose. Who’s in prison, and who’s out? Who’s alive, and who isn’t anymore? Sooner or later, someone he doesn’t want to see is bound to rock the life he has established for himself and his daughter.

This is the sort of literary fiction that lets the reader forget that it’s art, because it reads a lot like a thriller. There are scenes that are laugh-out-loud funny; my favorite involves a car thief named Charlie.

Samuel Hawley seems to me to be a character for our time. Fifty years ago, a novel like this would have been controversial—and it may still be, who knows? Great literature often is. But today with the stratospheric growth of the American prison population, many more members of the book buying public either have done time, know someone that has, or know someone that barely escaped having to do so. It’s no longer unthinkable that a person that has done some truly reprehensible things, may also be a human being.

One way or the other, you have to read this book. The buzz it’s created is only the beginning. If you read one novel this year, let this be it. It’s available now.

I've always been drawn to coming-of-age stories. The problem has been finding ones that appeal to me in terms of not just the character who's coming-of-age, but also the setting, time period, and minor characters all needing to "click" for me as well. The Last Child by John Hart has always been my go to coming-of-age favorite and recently I've added A Brilliant Death by Robin Yocum to that very short list. Now, I'll be adding The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley ....my list is growing!!

Twelve Lives is, at its core, a novel filled with suspense but, fear not, there's also a mystery for all of us die hard mystery lovers. To start, we meet Samuel, father to Loo and husband of Lily who died many years earlier. Her death had been ruled accidental but as I got further into the story, I began to wonder whether that was true. There are many reasons this question entered my mind, the biggest being Samuel's past. Through chapters alternating between past and present we get to know Samuel, starting around age 20 when he chooses to start down a path of criminality which leads to his first "bullet," that is, the first of TWELVE times he's shot. The chapters follow his life through places like Wyoming, Alaska, The Midwest, and the desert, to the coast of Massachusetts where he and Loo eventually decide to stay and make a home.

These "bullet" chapters alternate with present day ones in which we get to know Loo, Hawley, Mabel (Lily's mom) and many more of the unique characters living in the coastal fishing community. I'm going to be honest, some of the "bullet" chapters became a little monotonous and I found myself rushing to get through them to return back to the present which were my favorite parts of the book. I LOVED reading about Loo and being privy to all of her firsts...1st time shooting guns, 1st love, 1st time driving (illegally of course)...as well as her relationship with Hawley who seemed to hold her at arm's length just a little too much as his fierce desire to protect her from his past was always at the forefront of his mind- it really occupied his thoughts and drove everything he did. I could really understand this because in his (criminal) past he left behind dead bodies, bridges burned, and many enemies made...he knew that one day it would all catch up with him. That's what I meant by suspense and the author built it brilliantly!

The more I write, the more I'm thinking this is actually a harder book to review than I initially thought because there's SO much I could talk about but in the interest of keeping this fairly short, I'll just point out a few final reasons I really loved this book:

Pace - The author has crafted such a well-paced novel that I quickly became immersed in the story from beginning to end
Multidimensional, Flawed Characters - I'm not exactly sure how she created such vivid, nuanced characters, whether it was her use of exquisitely fine tuned language, but the people in this story were REAL and alive to me
Themes - I loved how she examined the fluidity of time...wishing it could be turned back in Samuel's case but also exploring how he and Loo both discover it actually marches on no matter how much they wished to change or stop it
Setting - Loved it!! Small town coastal fishing community...I could picture it perfectly

The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley by Hannah Tinti
Publisher: The Dial Press
Release Date: March 28, 2017
Length: 400 pages

Single Sentence Summary: Samuel Hawley’s teenage daughter, Loo, is just beginning to put together the pieces about her father’s dark history – his very dark history.

Primary Characters: Samuel Hawley – Samuel has been a lot of things in his life: a desperate teenager, a common thief, a killer, a loving husband, a father, a protector. Loo Hawley – A brilliant girl, teenage Loo finds herself settled for the first time and it’s in the town where her mother grew up. Questions inevitably follow.

Synopsis: For as long as she can remember Loo and her father have led a life on the move. Their homes? Motels. Their stays? Weeks to months. Her schooling? Sporadic. Their traveling companions? Guns, rifles, a licorice jar stuffed with money, and a bear skin rug. As Loo reaches her teens, Samuel wants to give her a more normal life, so settles them both in Olympus, Massachusetts where Loo’s mother grew up. Such a huge life change brings with it questions: questions about her mother, questions about their life on the run, and most of all questions about Samuel, for he is the biggest unknown in Loo’s life.

Review: The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, Hannah Tinti’s new book, is definitely one of my favorites this year. She did a masterful job of combining a coming-of-age story with a dark mystery. The chapters alternated between Samuel’s past and the life Loo and Samuel shared in Olympus. Samuel’s life unfolded through the bullet wounds on his body. Each scar revealed a little more about the man that he was and the life of crime he’d chosen for himself. The other chapters focused more on Loo and her reactions to being the new girl in her mother’s hometown. But, the more Loo learned the more questions she had about Samuel and his dark past.

It’s easy to love a book when you love the characters and I was crazy about both Samuel and Loo in The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley. Taking an objective look at Samuel Hawley, there really is far more to dislike than to like. He was a criminal and a killer. The choices he’d made spilled over into the lives of the people he loved most, his wife, Lily, and his daughter, Louise. Somehow, Tinti managed to give this man redeeming qualities so that I couldn’t help but care about Samuel. He was a man in pain who, above all else, loved and wanted to protect his daughter.

“Hawley told her it was her mother’s hometown…..A normal life, Hawley said. With a real house and a neighborhood and friends her own age and a school where she could find a place to belong.”

Loo captivated me even more than Samuel. This was a girl who’d led a life on the run, and the transition to “normal” was not an easy one for Loo. She was different than most kids and making friends was not a skill she’d ever learned. Loo had holes in her life, the biggest being her mother. She’d only known Lily through Samuel and the small shrine he built to her in the bathroom everywhere they had lived. As a teen walking the same streets her mother had, Loo’s appetite for details about Lily could not be quenched, and Samuel couldn’t give her more. When she looked to others for answers, Loo began to see her father with fresh eyes. What she saw slowly eroded their bond.

“Loo watched him shoulder the rifle and understood, in a flickering moment, that her father was exactly that – a professional. All the guns in their house. All the scars on his body. All the ways that he was careful. It was because of this.”

Hannah Tinti’s writing was truly magnificent. She didn’t judge her characters, but treated them with empathy. She gave reasons for Sam’s actions without excusing them. In Loo she created a character that elicited both sympathy and hope. I’m predicting that The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley will be high on my list of top books for 2017! Grade: A

Note: I received a copy of this book from the publisher (via NetGalley) in exchange for my honest review.

It is easy to consider The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley to be two separate novels, one being Hawley's story and the other Loo's; in fact, the publisher is marketing the novel as part coming-of-age and part thriller. That their stories unfold in alternating chapters only serves to highlight their separateness. Indeed, the tone of each chapter differs greatly. Hawley's chapters are brimming with violence and cold calculation. Loo's chapters are more innocent, filled with confusion and a general need to understand the world. However, to consider them as separate simplifies their stories and ignores what makes the novel so powerful.

Hawley may be a dangerous man with his own personal arsenal, but it is love that fuels him and dictates his actions. In each of his chapters, as he adds one bullet scar upon another, we see the man peeled back to his very essence. After the first time this happens, Hawley stops being a criminal with a penchant for guns and instead becomes a man with a shitty childhood who made some poor decisions and is now trying to make sure his daughter does not pay for those decisions. He is a father with an undying love for his child, one who would literally kill if it means protecting her. He is a husband still grieving for his beloved wife. He is so very human and and real that you forget he is fictional.

When we first meet Loo, it quickly becomes obvious that her childhood has been anything but ordinary. There is a feralness to her that has nothing to do with her nomadic upbringing. As she grows older, that animal ferocity lessens but never quite disappears. In many ways, this lurking wildness makes her more dangerous than Hawley as one never knows when she is going to lose that thin veneer of politeness and reveal her true self to her classmates or fellow townspeople. Yet, as with Hawley, her chapters reveal the reason for her viciousness, and her exposed vulnerability makes you want to protect her more than anything else. She is nothing more than a little girl who lost her mother at a young age and is trying to make sense out of the nontraditional world established by her father.

The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley is ultimately a love story without any of the hallmarks of such. It is the story of a man's love for his daughter, who is the one pure thing in his life. It is the story of a daughter's love for her deceased mother as she tries to navigate her way through life without female guidance. It is the story of the same daughter's complex love for her father, the man who raised and protected her and taught her to be self-sufficient but may have also been involved in her mother's death. It is the story of first loves and last loves. There may be violence and gore among its pages, but love is the tie that binds Hawley and Loo together, and love is what will keep this book fresh in your mind and heart long after you finish reading it.

Samuel Hawley has lived a very dangerous life as the twelve bullet holes in his body attest. He has spent most of his life on the run first with his friend, Jove, then with his wife’ Lily, and after her death, with their daughter, Loo. But, now as Loo enters adolescence, he has decided, for her sake, to give up his criminal ways and has moved them to a small fishing town, Olympus, where her late mother is from. It isn’t easy to get accepted but eventually they do as Samuel gets work in the fishing industry and Loo seeks to uncover what really happened to her mother while finding first love with the son of the town’s rather quirky environmentalist. But the pair will soon learn that it is not so easy to escape the past and it may very well destroy the relationship between them.

The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley by author Hannah Tinti is a beautifully written book combining myth, metaphors, and genres to tell the story of familial bonds, how the past is never fully left behind, how it continues to influence the presence, and what we are willing to do to protect the people we love. Chapters alternate between Loo’s coming-of-age tale and Samuel’s story told around the origin of each bullet hole. But despite the fact that these two different narratives seem to head in opposite directions as Loo’s story moves forward and Samuel’s backwards, they work in tandem, Samuel’s past helping to explain Loo’s present. Characters throughout are well-drawn, complicated, with flaws that we can relate to. The story is a complex and compelling tale, at times humorous, poignant, heartbreaking, redemptive, but, most of all, it is a story about love. This was not an easy read but it is one of the few books I know that I will go back to again and again.

Thanks to Netgalley and Random House for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review

I received an advanced reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.


I had not heard of Hannah Tinti before. I hadn't gotten onto her bandwagon after the publication of her second novel, The Good Thief, in 2008. But then I heard Michael Kindness (of Books On The Nightstand fame) rave about The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley on the Drunk Book Club podcast late last year as one of the most anticipated books of 2017.

I quickly signed onto my Netgalley account and got myself an advanced copy, which I proceeded to devour while vacationing in Taiwan in February. And all I can say is wow!

Part coming of age story, part gritty crime drama, Tinti's novel follows the story of Samuel Hawley and his teenage daughter Loo. Quickly we find out that Samuel's body is decorated by twelve bullet wounds that reveal a dark and violent past, one that Loo has no recollection of but desperately wants to find out. Tinti takes us from past to present, slowly revealing the story behind each of Samuel's wounds and Loo's persistent search for the truth about her father, her deceased mother, and why her childhood was filled with constant running away only to return to her mother's home village. Slowly, the two worlds come to head, as Samuel must confront his past choices and their consequences.

Almost cinematic in scope and pace, Tinti still keeps her literary sensibilities, using deeply moving prose to explore the regret that is permanently etched onto Samuel and the bewilderment and resentment he has passed on to a daughter. Yet, Tinti does not get bogged down in her words, able to move the plot forward, keeping the reader turning the page, and ending with a more than satisfying conclusion.

Tinti is a marvelous writer and she has given us a captivating story about violence, death, youth and renewal. There are a few stellar books worth picking up this spring, make sure that the Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley is one of them.

First off, I loved this book. I thought it was beautiful and gritty in all the right ways. The dynamic of the father with a dark past and the teen daughter coming of age was achingly good. The tale covers several years of Loo's life with her father Samuel, and also years before. Samuel's goal is to prepare Loo for a future that may not be perfect, sort of street survivalist education. Hot wiring cars, firing guns... it's all in there.

I think my favorite part of the book was the ease of the heart-filled writing. Tinti has a practiced style that draws you in to her imagery and world with all of your senses. And more than that, her structure of this story is intriguing as well in that she has built it around Samuel's many scars.

"The marks on her father’s body had always been there. He did not show them off to Loo but he did not hide them, either. They reminded her of the craters on the moon that she studied at night with her telescope. Circles made from comets and asteroids that slammed into the cold, hard rock because it had no protective atmosphere. Like those craters, Hawley’s scars were signs of previous damage, that had impacted his life long before she was born. And like the moon, Hawley was always circling between Loo and the rest of the universe."

Through each of their moments together, you can feel the love between them. This book is one dripping with respect, a binding sort of unbreakable love, pain, regret, swelling bittersweetness... it is bound to move you in some way. And though I feel like I have read several books where the protagonist's return to the hometown of the mother that is no longer in the picture (either because she is wayward, deceased or otherwise), it still felt fresh and explored in new ways that I hadn't quite seen yet.

Highly recommended read. Take your time with it, let it build, and enjoy.

This is a contemporary/thriller adult lit book, but it also features a female teen protagonist so it has elements of a coming-of-age story as well. I see how it can have crossover potential for mature older teens.

Note: Thank you to NetGalley and Dial Press for a copy of this ARC in exchange for a review. This in no way impact my opinion of the book.

So powerful, and so compulsively readable. As we went hurtling towards the end of this book, I dreaded the ending, but couldn't stop reading. Memorable!

Samuel Hawley is a professional criminal. He is also a father raising his daughter Loo. He has been a single dad since his wife died when Loo was an infant. Loo has spent her life moving from place to place and always on the run. Once Loo became older she began to realize her father was not an ordinary dad, but a man with a dark past that continues to haunting him. By the time she became a teenager she was ready to find a more permanent home and Sam seemed to be ready too. Loo is a tough young lady. She does not fit in at school and does not seek out friends.
The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley are actually twelve brushes with death. Each life is connected to a bullet wound with a remaining scar. The chapters seem to alternate between Sam and Loo's current lives and Sam's revisiting of each story that is connected to all twelve bullets. Samuel Hawley is not a very likable man. He is a thief and a murderer. He is also a grieving widower and a devoted father who would stop at nothing to protect his daughter. There were times when I felt deep empathy for Sam and and many times when I did not. The story is well written, interesting and there were some great suspenseful moments that kept me on the edge of my seat.

The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley by Hannah Tinti is a roller coaster ride of a story. I loved the way truth slowly comes to light in alternating chapters that flip back and forth between past and present. The love between father and daughter in the most extreme of circumstances resonated with me. Local color with vivid details of Gloucester, MA, here known as Olympus, especially the description of the greasy pole contest, added a lot to the story. Tinti's writing is terrific, and very visual. I kept thinking this would make a great movie.

This is a rather long book and I would have preferred fewer bloody scenes - perhaps six or eight Lives rather than 12, but I highly recommend it to those who value great writing and are not averse to violent action, and to those who appreciate novels that portray a specific locale with spot-on authenticity. Setting plays an important role in the story, especially Gloucester, but also the glaciers of Alaska, a prairie dog town in Wyoming, the Adirondacks, and other parts of the country.

Do you ever read a book, know that you love it, but yet somehow can’t really put into words why? That’s how I feel about Hannah Tinti’s The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley. What initially drew me to this book was reading the synopsis and realizing that the book focuses on the relationship between a father and daughter. I can’t say that I’ve read nearly enough books that explore that dynamic so I was eager to give this book a shot.

Samuel Hawley and his daughter Loo (short for Louise) have spent most of Loo’s life living what can best be described as a transient lifestyle, moving from place to place and never staying anywhere too long. The only sense of permanence that Loo has experienced all this time is the makeshift shrine that Hawley builds for Loo’s mother in each place. Loo’s mother, Lily, drowned when Loo was just a baby, so it has just been Loo and her dad for as long as she can remember. We are given hints early on that the transient lifestyle Loo and her Dad are living stems from the fact that Hawley has a somewhat checkered past. Although Loo appears perfectly content living the way she and her Dad always have, when the novel opens and we meet Hawley and then 12 year old Loo, Hawley has decided that it’s time for Loo to have a more permanent and stable way of life and thus has settled them back in Lily’s hometown of Olympus, Massachusetts. As they go about their day-to-day lives in this tiny town, we start to get more and more hints that Hawley’s past is indeed a colorful one and that not even Loo, the person who is closest to him in the world, knows all that there is to know about him. The extent of Hawley’s past misadventures becomes very apparent when Hawley is coerced into participating in a town event and is required to remove his shirt to take part. When the shirt comes off, we see that Hawley’s body is riddled with old bullet wound scars. So many scars, in fact, that it seems nearly impossible he is even still alive.

LIKES
The revealing of so many scars was where things got especially interesting for me because the author then proceeds to use the bullet wound scars as a roadmap to carry us through Hawley’s past. She alternates chapters that are devoted to explaining how he received each bullet wound with chapters of the new life he is trying to start with Loo. What I loved about this way of constructing the story was how we see Hawley first as a dad, doing the best he can, willing to sacrifice anything and everything to give his daughter a normal life. Tinti fully humanizes him before revealing his past where we then see that Hawley has done a lot of awful things in his day. He has stolen things, hurt people, heck he has even killed people. But somehow, because I still see him first as Loo’s dad, I love the character in spite of the many questionable choices he has made in the past. I think if Tinti had revealed the gory details of Hawley’s past first and then tried to move forward and show that he has now reformed himself and become a great dad, Hawley wouldn’t be nearly as endearing as he is.

As much as the story is about Hawley and his past, I would also consider it to be a coming of age story for Loo. She spends much of the story trying to make sense of this new world she is now living in and what her place is in it, and she is particularly determined to learn more about what happened to her mother. Hawley has sought to protect Loo from the full truth of her mother’s death because he knows that it will be even more heartbreaking for her than the truth she has been led to believe all her life. When Loo meets her grandmother (Lily’s mother) for the first time after they settle in Olympus, her grandmother implies that Hawley is in some way responsible for Lily’s death. This makes Loo’s journey to find the truth all the more poignant as Hawley is all she really has in this world. Can she forgive him if he is responsible? Loo’s story becomes especially moving as we cycle back and forth between her chapters set in the present and Hawley’s chapters set in the past. In Hawley’s chapters, we see how he and Lily met and fell in love, and then in present-day chapters, we follow Loo as she slowly unravels the mystery surrounding her mom’s death. Tinti does a beautiful job weaving together the past and present in a heartwrenching journey that ultimately brings Loo to that truth she has been so desperately seeking.

Tinti adds even more complexity to her story by making it a bit of a thriller as well as the ghost of Hawley’s past still lurks and threatens this new life he is trying so hard to make for his daughter. All of these different layers – the past, the present, the love, the suspense — and how they effortlessly fit together is what makes The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley such an engaging read.

DISLIKES?
I can’t really say that I have any complaints about the novel. At first I’ll admit I was a little wary about the bullet hole chapters, especially since they were actually named BULLET NUMBER ONE, BULLET NUMBER TWO, etc. I thought ‘Oh boy, this is either going to be hokey or it’s going to be brilliant.’ Thankfully, brilliant won out and it worked fabulously.

FINAL THOUGHTS
If you’re looking for a wonderfully intricate read that authentically captures the father-daughter bond, then give The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley a read. I would, however, forewarn that there is a lot of violence as you can probably guess from the few hints I dropped about Hawley’s past. Both love and violence are at the core of this tale.

This is a unique book—I can’t think of any novels to compare it to. It begins when Loo is twelve years old. She and her father have been on the run her entire life—sometimes staying someplace for six months, other times moving quickly from hotel to hotel in the dead of night. Now, Loo’s father Hawley buys a home in Loo’s dead mother’s hometown in Massachusetts with the idea that they won’t have to move again and Loo can have something resembling a normal life.

The story covers Loo from the age of twelve to seventeen and went back and forth in time to how Hawley met her mother and how he got his twelve gunshot wounds. Some of the writing was really beautiful, but what kept me turning pages was wanting to find out about Hawley’s criminal past and what was going to happen to the two of them.

Unfortunately, I didn’t identify or like any of the characters, so I didn’t love the book.

Thanks to NetGalley for the opportunity to review this book.

I'll be honest, at first, I didn't think I was going to like the book. It started off slow and I began to wonder where the story was going. However, that quickly changed as I became immersed in Loo's life - and Hawley's past. We follow Loo from the age of 12 to 17, with interspersing chapters on Hawley's past transgressions and how he acquired the different scars that mark his body. Both the past and the present were riveting and they complemented each other to allow for an understanding of the bond between this father and daughter. Their relationship was in no way perfect, but it made sense to them, and it made sense to me as a reader. This was an emotionally charged novel that showed various different aspects of a father-daughter relationship that is in itself very unique. The language was beautiful and moving, highlighting the pain and love that both Loo and Hawley feel. There was one aspect of this novel that bothered me a bit and it was the violence exhibited by Loo and her father's lack of admonishment for her violent tendencies. It made sense in the context of the story and the characters but it was the one thing I wish had been addressed. The level of aggression that Loo shows is quite high and I just wish that someone had helped her deal with that in the story. That is the only negative I had for this novel. Overall, I found this to be an intriguing and deep novel that explored an interesting family dynamic!

Noooo! It can’t be over! The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley is one of those books that you can’t stand to see end. I want to know what happens to Loo and Sam, Marshall, and even Marshall’s pill of a mother.

There are infinitely many ways to love. Even if we secretly think our way of loving is the best and the right way, we can always be surprised by the power of a man loving a woman and his child in his own best and right way.

AMAZING! This is the type of book that is going to have readers up until the wee hours of the morning. What I really enjoyed about this book was the relationship between Hawley and Loo. Both are extremely strong protagonists that "fill" the pages with their presence. Loo sees the scars that riddle her father's back, the way he limps, the way he fights with his fists, and deeply loves him, in spite of how difficult and complicated her own upbringing becomes. It's really a relationship that few characters in the book truly understand and it does lead to both father and daughter becoming outcasts. But there is no doubt that Hawley will stop at nothing to protect his daughter, especially, as ghosts from his past threaten to harm Loo.