Alice is a little shaky. She has two weeks to clean out her mother's home before it's demolished. Her husband Walker is having an affair. Her 16 year old daughter Caitlin is fighting with Walker about her college choice. Her mother has dementia. And, she's just discovered letters her brother Rob wrote before his death. Letters that have been kept hidden from her. Rob disappeared when he was a teen, leaving behind a mystery Alice couldn't solve, even after they got news of his death in 2007. Her hunt for what made her brother leave is at the heart of this well thought out novel of family secrets. Each letter reveals a little more of the story. And, Alice has to face her own past with Jake, the lover she gave up to hunt for Rob when she was 22. Cook has a nice touch with the little things (there's a wonderful description of a dining room) as well as with storytelling. The characters- even Rob- are well done and entirely believable. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. An excellent debut and read.

The premise and story was very interesting but it turned out to be a flop for me, way too slow of a pace. I feel like nothing happened and I felt no connection to any characters. This one was not the book for me but it might be for you!

When 11 year old Alice’s bother Rob runs away from home during their annual vacation, she doesn’t realize that it will be forever. Deep in her heart, she just knows he will return. Rather than follow her love and her dreams, she stays close to their childhood home, always on the lookout for him.

After years of torture, she decides to “put it in a box in her mind” and move on as best she can, telling her new boyfriend and soon to be husband that she a brother “but we aren’t close”. And so Alice begins her life, employing all the training her mother gave her, knowing what to put in a box and what to say and what face to show to the world.

Several years later, while pregnant with her second child, news of Rob’s death shocks Alice.

A decade later, with her mother in an assisted care facility, slowly succumbing to the effects of dementia, Alice must close up her childhood home for good. While going through the house, she realizes just how long her mother had been suffering with dementia. She also finds some boxes of Rob’s that were mailed after he died and in one, letters to be sent to various people.

Alice slowly begins to discover the story of the brother she lost and in the process learns about herself and her own children and what her children know about her.

The idea behind this book was very good. Slowly peeling back the layers of family and secrets, we begin to see just how much of the family foundation is built on lies.

There were a couple of things that I did not enjoy. Jake – everything about Jake was pointless other than to show what she was willing to give up in order to find her brother. Jake and Alice meeting again after so many years and their reunion was not believable and not relevant to the story and also a little too much to be believed in the telling of how their lives intersected.

Not enough was told about Alice’s mother and father and Uncle Jamie but there were just enough glimmers that I figured out one of the pivotal relationships very early on.

The ending felt flat to me.

Alice’s daughter’s insight into Alice was very well done and seemed to open Alice’s eyes quite a bit.

Thank you to NetGalley and to the Publisher for the e-ARC in exchange for my honest review

How To Bury Your Brother. A strong title. One that gets a reaction right away, different emotions depending on the nature of ones relationship with their brother. For me, this title inflicted sadness. I have one sibling, a brother.

At the young age of fifteen Robinson (Rob) runs away from home. His sister Alice is left questioning why her brother left, where he went, and if he's coming back. The summer of 2007, 24 years later, still without answers, Alice attends Robs funeral...

Fast forward to the winter of 2016. While clearing out her childhood home Alice discovers a stack of letters, each addressed to a different person ... all written by her brother. From here a new chapter in Alice's life is written.

To say this book was beautiful would be an understatement. This story was complex, thought provoking, layer upon layer of family relationships, self discovery but ultimately learning the truth, coming to terms with how to move forward and say goodbye.

I highly recommend this book but beware, there are heavy trigger warnings ❤️

Huge thank you to Sourcebooks Landmark for my copy!!

I wanted to read this book based on the description and title. I found that certain aspects of the book were very repudiative. The loss of a sibling is hard and this book covers that very well. I just wish there would have been more to it..

Alice and her brother, Rob were close growing up at home. When Rob turned 15 years old, he ran away from home. Alice can’t believe he left. She is upset. Her parents refuse to talk about Rob. Why? Alice goes to college and meets her husband. She doesn’t love him but thinks he will provide and take good care of her. Rob dies and there is a funeral where Alice speaks. Why? Walker and Alice’s marriage is fine at first. Her mother goes into a nursing home. Alice goes to her parent’s home to get it ready to go on sale. She goes to a space/tunnel between her brother’s bedroom and her bedroom. She finds with her name on a box and Rob’s guitar. In a box, she finds several envelopes with names on them written in Rob’s handwriting.. When she discovers Walker is having an affair, she continues on without telling Walker about what she found a her parents home that is getting ready to sale. She decides to deliver the letters for Rob and for herself. She hopes people will share the letters with her as she feels she doesn’t know her brother after he left home. Will she be able to find them? Alice doesn’t understand why Rob didn’t write her a letter. Why didn’t he?

The novel is about a dysfunctional family, love, a mystery and secrets. I felt Alice’s hopelessness about not being able to see Rob. It’s tender and dark. It’s a book that will make you think about secrets and what they do. To relationships.

Alice's beloved brother Rob dies from an overdose after years of being estranged from his sister and family. The memories she holds are old yet dear. Her father, mother and Uncle never speak of her brother or his death. Or more importantly why he left. Eight years after his death, and subsequently her father's death, Alice is challenged with selling the family home and care taking for her mother who is now failing with Alzheimer's disease. <br />By chance Alice finds a box of letters to her parents, Uncle and several persons she doesn't know written by Rob. She takes the bold step of following the letters to each recipient in hopes to learn who her brother really was and why she hadn't received a letter. <br />Alice's own life is built on deceptions for the sake of family and security. But the letters found release in her a desire to reconnect to the brother that she loved so much as a child. The journey to the answers both reinvigorate her own stale life but she finds much more than she bargained for.

I have been thinking about my takeaway on this book and I am conflicted. I am having trouble finding the point, the import, the understanding of so much hurt and despair. So many subtexts run through this story but they circle back to the same issue, a sister’s love and loss of her brother. The repetition bothered me, the inability to shake off the constant self-doubt and waiting for the perfect time, place, thought to force everything to coalesce. It was so painful to watch the abuse, almost knowing but denying, feeling but discounting, seeing a life caving in day by day.

I didn’t dislike the book, I just didn’t much care for it. Thank you NetGalley and Sourcebooks Landmark for a copy.

After her older brother leaves home while Alice is a child, she never hears from him again. At his funeral, she yearns for answers and it is only some 10 years later that the mystery begins to unravel. After finding a collection of letters addressed to people in her brothers life, Alice beings a journey that will alter the course of her own life in her quest for understanding.
As the story unfolds, many unexpected twists present themselves making this book hard to put down.

How To Bury Your Brother
By Lindsey Rogers Cook

Thank you to NetGalley and Sourcebooks Landmark for this uncorrected proof in exchange for an honest review.
How to Bury Your Brother is the first novel from Lindsey Rogers Cook. I didn’t discover this until after I had finished the novel, and I was completely shocked. The book is well thought out, has a very unique premise, and is overall an exciting read.
The book opens with Alice, at the time in her early 30s, in attendance at her older brother’s funeral. He had been missing for most of her life, having run away from home when she was a preteen. Alice never understood why he left, and struggled with feeling abandoned by the only person who she felt ever truly understood her. The book then picks up ten years later, when Alice is now raising a high school senior and a ten year old son, while dealing with her mother’s declining mental faculties, her husband’s infidelity, her own feelings of apathy, and the gargantuan task of readying her mother’s home for auction before it is razed. While cleaning out her childhood home, she finds a box of Robinson’s things, including a stack of undelivered letters written shortly before he died. Realizing that he didn’t write her a letter, but that the letters could contain all of the answers she has been searching for the last 30 years of her life, Alice begins a journey to find the recipients of the letters.
I really enjoyed this book. I have never read a book quite like this one, where an entire relationship between siblings is told from an idealized, what-could-have-been standpoint. I enjoyed learning about Robinson and his journey along with Alice. The only thing I was left dissatisfied by was a specific scene during the culmination of the book. I can’t really go into that here, without giving away the majority of the plot, so I will just encourage you to check out this novel by a new author.
How to Bury Your Brother is set for publication on May 12, 2020.

4-5 stars! This book may contain triggers for some, but if you are okay with triggering themes, then you will likely enjoy it. I think that it was well written, developed, and is important subject manner. The way it’s written really makes it easy to grip you and not let go until you finish, but you will be on an emotional roller coaster throughout it. I found it to be realistic, chilling, and heartbreaking at times, but overall I found myself engaged and wanting to know more about the characters I’ve gotten to know! I highly recommend if you enjoy books that really go for your heart and soul and include a lot of emotional turmoil while reading!
Will make sure to buzz up on different platforms and use my low amazon reviewer number on release date!

Alice is just 11 when her 15-year-old brother Robinson (Rob) disappears, a runaway who she never sees again until his funeral following his suicide years later. Over the years, she has convinced her husband (Walker) and herself that Rob wasn't that important to her, even though, as she gives his eulogy, she realizes this was never true.

In the present day, Alice is still with Walker (who is a stereotypical husband of means and a creep throughout the book,) running an environmental center that her husband paid to open as a project to keep her busy, (which sounds as condescending as it should,) and has two children and a dog. The life she should have aspired for according to her now-suffering-from dementia mother.

Alice is cleaning out her parents' home, when she discovers a box filled with letters that Rob left for seven people that were never delivered, but none for Alice herself. The rest of the book is centered around Alice delivering the letters and trying to learn why Rob left and never came back for her.

This book had it's sad moments, but I really enjoyed reading it. My favorite character was actually Alice's teenage daughter, who was stronger and smarter than so many of the other characters, a trait not shown very often in female teenage characters in this genre. And I liked how Alice recognized her daughter's strength and used it as motivation to start to take charge of her own life instead of being so fixated on outward appearance. I think the book would have been even more successful if the main characters were less stereotypical, less black-and-white in their thinking, and given more depth, but I still really enjoyed reading about Alice's growth as a person (instead of just as a wife and mother.)

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with the ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review. It has not influenced my opinion.

Robinson Tate left home when he was 15, never to be seen or heard from again. He left his family and the sister that loved him dearly. Alice is grown up now and married, but she has never forgotten Rob. The book opens with Rob’s death followed by his funeral. It was now time for Alice to say goodbye and move forward with her life. Eight and a half years later Alice is cleaning out her parents home when she finds Rob’s belongings. Belongings that open the box she has kept him in and sends her on a journey to truly find the brother she lost. A journey of love, loss and hope. An emotion filled story of a love that never died and the journey that brings it all back home.

“How to Bury Your Brother” was a great book once it picked up speed. The first half of the book was slow and I had a tough time engaging with it, but then I couldn’t put it down. I look forward to future books by this author.

Thank you to @netgalley and @bookmarked for the free* e-arc of How To Bury Your Brother by Lindsey Rogers Cook in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
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Rob ran away from home at 15, leaving behind a younger sister, Alice, who loved him dearly. He was her safe haven. Their mother was snarky and snooty and their father was rarely around. So when Rob runs away, Alice is confused. Why did he leave? Why didn’t he take her with him? Years later, Rob has passed away and Alice stumbles upon a box of letters. Ron’s handwriting decorates the front of each envelope. This sets her on a journey that she may later come to regret.
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How To Bury Your Brother had my attention from the start. I feel like the writing was well done and I got to know just enough about each character to truly understand the story.
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*The free book did not influence my rating.

I don’t remember what it was about the description for Lindsey Rogers Cook’s upcoming How to Bury Your Brother that first interested me. It’s her first novel, so I wasn’t already a fan of her work (sure am now, though). Possibly the promise of angst and family drama. Whatever it was that caught my attention and made me want to preview this novel, I’m glad I did. It packed a hearty emotional punch, and not in a way that felt manipulated or contrived. Largely focused on grief, guilt, and honesty, How to Bury Your Brother examines the ripple effect that secrets can have within a family and how they can contort one’s mental and emotional health when left alone too long.

Alice adored her older brother, Rob, when she was younger. But when he was just a teenager, he ran away and she never saw him alive again. While the questions about what happened and why he left begin to surface for her at his funeral, it isn’t until almost a decade after that when her father is died and her mother’s dementia leaves Alice with the task of clearing out the family house. A bigger mess than she anticipated, Alice discovers boxes with her brother’s things, letters he wrote to friends and relatives, and a pile of papers that appear to be about him as well. Refusing help from her father’s adopted brother, Alice decides it’s finally time to figure out just what happened to her brother – why he left, where he went, and the truth about how he died.

One of the aspects of the story that I found most interesting was the way Cook captured Alice’s processing of each piece of new information she learned about her brother – especially that she did so without relying on a first-person narrative structure. She doesn’t simply reflect on what that means for how she experienced events in her past. Alice also reflects on how what she thought at those times impacted her behavior and led her to the life she currently lives. It isn’t just the ‘what if’s and how the life she lived might have been different. She also looks at how those impressions affect the types of relationships she has with her mother, her husband, her children. It’s a depth and nuance beyond just the choices she made and what happened because of them.

While there are aspects that could be seen as a convenient coincidence (like much surrounding Alice’s college boyfriend, Jake), there is enough messiness to it as well that it still works well for me. Not all of the letters Alice finds make much sense or prove as relevant to what Alice wants to know about her brother, but that only adds to the underlying truth of her struggle for answers. And even when answers reveal themselves, they don’t magically solve everything. Grief and guilt drive Alice throughout – and through her memories, we see that they drove her from the moment Rob left. But as she learns more of the truth, Alice also learns how to be honest with herself about her present and she must decide what – if anything – she want to do with that knowledge.

How to Bury Your Brother will be available on May 12, 2020.

Tw: suicide, drug use, sexual abuse of a minor

Thank you to Net Galley for a free ARC, all thoughts are my own.

This book starts off with a suicide- it’s an impactful suicide that leads to a woman realising so much of her life is a lie, but you don’t know that yet. Rob left Alice when she was 11, he was 15. When you meet Alice again she’s at Ron’s funeral where he died from an overdose. Eight years later and Alice is now cleaning out her aging mother’s house, where she finds Ron’s suicide letters and boxes. Alice then begins questioning what really happened to her brother. As Alice begins the journey to find out, she also discovers who she is.

This book was fine and it was good. You wanted to know about why Rob left and you wanted Alice to figure it out. Here’s my real concern though: why did her parents lie? You figure out at the end what actually happens and you learn VERY early that her mother knows more than she’s letting on, but why lie to Alice? Especially after Rob died (she was in her late 20s)? That was one question I had left unanswered and the one I really wanted to know.

Over all the book is good and I really enjoyed it. My biggest problem is the timeline is a bit much- you jump between past and present a few times with no clear indication of which is which.

This book is really good! It has suspense, heartfelt family memories and keeps you guessing. It is all wrapped up with a good ending and I would definitely read more from this author!

This is one of my favorite genres, and I thought the summary sounded interesting. However, the pace was way too slow for my preference. As a result, I had a hard time staying engaged. I'd expected a bit more character development, too.

Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC and the opportunity to review it.

The premise of this book sounded interesting, and it was done incredibly well.

TRIGGER WARNING: overdose, suicide, infidelity, dementia, substance use, mention of statutory rape (off-page)

It starts with an overdose, and a funeral. We aren't given much information about Rob, the guy who died, but the story focuses on his family, mainly Alice, his sister.

As with so many families, there's an image to uphold, and Alice's family is working hard to maintain theirs. Rather than putting things out in the open, the family has secrets in layers. The first surrounds Rob - he's estranged from the family, and Alice, who was just a young girl when he left, doesn't know anything about the man he became. There's hints of trouble within her marriage, but not much is explained in the immediacy of processing a death.

Nearly a decade later, Alice's mother is in a nursing home, and the task of clearing out her house falls to Alice. She discovers a box that has her name on it, and it has letters from her brother. While there isn't one for her, she feels obligated to deliver these letters in hopes of finding out more about him. She also discovers an autopsy report that reveals that there was more than originally revealed going on with her brother.

On her quest to find out who her brother is, she discovers who she is and makes some weighty decisions about her own life. Flashbacks clue us in to more of her life story, which is shown in bits and pieces throughout the book.

The pacing wasn't consistent throughout the book. The first half of the book was engaging but fairly slow moving, and around the halfway point, it kept picking up speed, and I flew through the remainder of the book. It was well worth the time, though. I'd strongly recommend this book, as long as the trigger warnings are those that you can handle.