I like how this memoir book is constructed, not exactly in a linear way. You get to learn about the author's past, but also learn a few bits about current life. Despite having some two weird figures of parents, she went on to have a more or less normal life and write stories and even a book about her life.

I enjoyed reading Danielle’s story about her mother. I loved how detailed and real the story felt. I felt like I was by Danielle’s side as she explored the reservation and learned more about her mother’s life.
Overall, the story was beautiful and I enjoyed learning more about Navajo Indians and their culture.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Random House for gifting me a digital ARC of this memoir by Danielle Geller. 3.5 stars.

"You're an alcoholic," grandma would tell me, even when I was very young. "You just haven't had your first drink." This pretty well sums up the cycle of alcoholism, abuse and mental illness in this story. When Danielle's mother is dying in a Florida hospital from alcohol withdrawal, Danielle travels there and collects a few boxes of family material that her mom had saved. She tries to put together the picture of her family history from these documents, traveling back to the Navajo reservation where her mom was raised. We also see how Danielle's dad came in and out of her life, bringing abuse, neglect, and trouble along with him.

This was a difficult book for me to read. The generational cycles of alcoholism combined with horrible choices, mental illness and abuse are well laid out. However, the book went between the present as Danielle was exploring her family history to the past, but it wasn't always sequential or easy to follow. For example, one chapter would have her sister homeless and addicted to drugs; the next, she'd be in her home with a job. I never quite understand how or when that happened. Also, and this could definitely be an ARC issue, the footnotes didn't seem to make sense with the spot they were listed. Danielle had a great heart and wanted to help everyone, which also caused her to be an enabler - although that certainly isn't an easy line to straddle. The fact that Danielle made it out of this family a contributing citizen is certainly a bright spot in this tale.

Danielle Gellar’s memoir was a bit different from what I was expecting, but I found I was very much invested in how she moved on with her life after growing up in such a dysfunctional family.

It’s sad to think that such an unstable family situation is what some children know as normal and this was the case with Gellar’s family. Alcoholism and brief stints in jail become somewhat of a regular occurrence. Raised mainly by their paternal grandmother, Danielle and her sister manage to keep a connection with their parents, even though they see them sporadically.

Danielle’s mother was raised on a Navajo reservation, but left as a young woman and seemingly abandoned her heritage, having little contact with her family remaining on the reservation. As a result, Danielle and her sister are only able to fill in the blanks after their mother has passed away.

There wasn’t as much information about the Navajo traditions and life on the reservation as I was hoping for. It seems as if Gellar may have been a bit overwhelmed and unable to absorb it all in the few visits she made. Also, there were some situations on the reservation she wisely began to avoid. I did like the fact that she learned to weave, so it was good to see her embrace that part of her heritage.

Trigger warnings for those readers sensitive to drug and alcohol abuse.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for allowing me to read an advance copy and give my honest review.

This is a dark and unrelenting coming-of-age memoir of addiction, codependency, and grief. Geller's mom and dad gave her and her sister a choatic upbringing, and while I really loved Geller's writing style, this book felt more like 500 pages than 300. It was unnecessarily long and some of the stories began to feel repetitive - because let's be honest, how different can stories be when dealing with addicts that continually relapse and need to crash on your couch again? Geller seems to be the only one who escapes the addiction lifestyle - her mom, dad, and sister continually repeat the same cycle - and she makes a life for herself as a college professor in Canada. This book demonstrates the effects of generational trauma well and I was hopeful that Geller had finally broke out of that lifestyle with her new husband.

Like many writers, author Danielle Geller grew up in a family marked by alcoholism and self-destructive behavior. Geller's family is further notable in that they are Navajo. Despite her own bipolar disorder and the lingering effects of childhood separations and trauma, Geller lived to tell the tale that her parents and sister could not.

This book did not separate itself for me from the mass of dysfunctional family memoirs until about halfway in, when Geller travels to Arizona to meet her long-lost relatives. The memoir becomes more vivid when it draws upon Geller's own experiences, rather than family history.

I liked this book, but I didn't love it as much as I thought I would.

I received an electronic pre-publication copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I was not compensated in any way.

Dog Flowers is a heavy read. Both Geller's parents were alcoholics and at various times homeless. She and her sister were adopted by their grandmother but her younger sister grappled with the same issues as the parents. I felt sorry for the author and all,the hell she endured growing up, which continued as an adult. The author was used by her family as a banker and House even while she had her own issues. She is a good writer and the ending was solid. It's a very depressing story.

A very dark , depressing sad book the chronicles the author’s life with alcoholism, neglectful parents, drugs, troubled sisters, relationships with men and numerous road trips . The author connects with her Navajo family near the end of the book. I was hoping they would bring some healing and stability to her but their lives were just as troubled . My advice to this author is to find happiness with her husband away from her family until they make serious attempts to help themselves.

A daughter is reconciling her relationship with her mother and family through the objects her mother left behind after her death. A somber memoir of a Native American woman discovering her identity, heritage, and history. For fans of Jesmyn Ward and Ocean Vuong.

I find it ironic that the author describes herself as "a failure of an archivist" while studying library and information science because what she has constructed here is an entire archive of her family history with what was available to her and her own experiences. Although it was very raw and interesting to read through, it felt more like a process of sorting memories, anecdotes, and pictures that would be helpful to the author but not necessarily something the reader can quite connect with.
Overall, informative about the cycle of familial mental illness and substance abuse, along with some interesting Navajo tradition history but something fell short - almost as if though the author bared difficult & painfully honest anecdotes, there was a shock value but still a lack of depth. If she arrived at the "why" of sharing her story privately, then I'm glad for its existence.

I spent some time sitting here trying to think of a way to describe the narrative style of this memoir. The best description I can think of is that it is put together like a scrapbook of memories. It is not quite linear, but all of these memories are connected. I think it is important to understand the structure of this read beforehand or otherwise the narrative style might be frustrating. This is a history that ended up sticking with me once I got my head wrapped around it.

Danielle Geller was a library archivist and I think it shows in this memoir. This feels very much like archival records. This is a story about addiction, abuse, poverty and seemingly never ending cycle of it on generation after generation. This memoir explores the impact of this cycle on not only the author's life but her mother's. It is heavy and upsetting, but it is also brave. There is a lot of strength shown in the insights here.

This book has been advertised and compared to Educated and I think that is not quite accurate. I think people going in with an expectation that this is like Educated might be disappointed. While both are memoirs, both are vastly different in both style and story. I think this story deserves to be recognized as something completely different but also important.

I am going to be completely honest and say this is a difficult read. This may not sell you on this book, but I can also say with confidence this is not one you will easily forget either.

“Most days, I do not believe I know how to care for my mother’s ghost.” In her memoir, Geller revisits her haunted childhood, piecing together her mother’s story to understand herself. Her relationship with her family has been fraught due to her tumultuous upbringing, and only when she returns to her family’s life on the reservation does she start to find a sense of home in her adult years. At times, the writing was heart-wrenching, and at times, I felt I could skip entire paragraphs to get the gist. I appreciated the deeply intimate nature of the stories and photos Geller shared, it was one of the first books I have read that truly helped me understand the personal grief of being loved by a parent suffering from addiction - parsing out the traps from the truth is never easy.

I picked this memoir wanting to read something about the Navajo Nation. So, imagine my surprise when the first ⅓ of the book takes place in my home county of York, PA. In fact, only a small portion of the book takes place on the reservation, first when Dani returns for a memorial service for her mother and later for some short visits with her cousin, aunt and grandmother.
Dani Geller did not have any easy childhood or youth. The child of two alcoholics, she was passed between her father and grandmother; her mother never well enough to have custody. As she gets older, she begins to have her own mental health issues. Her sister is even worse off, a drug user, in and out of juvenile detention, foster homes, boot camps, ending up roaming the country.
This is a dark book, unrelentingly so. Dani never gives up on family. Hers is the opposite of tough love. She’s an enabler, constantly taking both her sister and father in. I kept waiting for someone to have an epiphany. Instead, the use and abuse just continues. I felt sorry for Dani and her family, but I struggled to connect. The book shows the unfortunate cycle of substance abuse between generations.
My thanks to netgalley and Random House for an advance copy of this book.

Thank you to Random House Publishing Group for approaching me and putting this memoir on my radar. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.

Dog Flowers is Danielle Geller's memoir. Geller tells her story openly and goes back and forth between the past and the present. The book starts when Danielle Geller’s mother dies of alcohol withdrawal during an attempt to get sober. In an attempt to retrace her mother's life in this memoir, Geller returns to the Navajo reservation where most of her family still lives. The memoir is both a narrative and an archive of one family’s troubled history. The book includes photos and letters from Geller's mother. I was surprised how quickly I flew through the pages. But Geller's writing style invites to continue reading her story. Her story is touching, exploring family, loss and (the absence) of grieve.

I recommend this memoir to everyone who enjoyed Educated by Tara Westover.

CW: substance abuse and abuse

This was a fascinating memoir that combined history, stories, memories, and documents which was done in a way that isn't normally used. This story is painful and includes a lot of real and raw memories.

Scattered throughout the book are photos, photocopies of calendars, letters, and documents and descriptions on what they are. I loved how much this added to the book and made everything seem even more real.

Danielle Geller writes with such unflinching honesty that at times I was embarrassed of myself. This memoir clarified my own experiences of being an Indian - like Danielle's mother, my grandfather left the tribal town as soon as he could, placing a barrier between family's direct line to our people and culture. He spent his adult life in Oklahoma City; his brothers who remained where they were born died of complications from alcoholism. (Unlike Danielle, I never saw my grandfather drink a drop.) I was taken to powwows and other tribal and pan-Indian gatherings and asked what my "ethnicity" was by random people.

Geller's upbringing was both full of fireside love and agonizing neglect. I do believe you can love your children and neglect them. I've seen too much for it not to be true. Geller doesn't plow through or sentimentalize her experiences; this memoir reads as an introduction to a life that will transcend. She remains tethered to her extended family in a bittersweet way that forces her into situations she thought she had left behind. If you love something, let it go, and all that. (But still be around when they're calling you up at 3:00 a.m., drunk and dopesick with nowhere to go.)

I hope Danielle Geller remains happy and healthy and keeps writing. All clichés aside, she is an actual voice of a generation who is forgiving without forgetting, reclaiming roots that have been hidden away - you can leave the stump and try to make it small and concealed, but the roots are still there.

Geller's loved ones have been stumbling through life with alcoholism since before she was born, and it's alcohol withdrawal that kills her mother, "Tweety" Lee. As she goes through her mother's belongings, Danielle is intrigued by what Tweety chose to hang onto, even through cycles of homelessness. As she explores her mother's past, she reflects on her own, recounting her years growing up-- bouncing custody between her grandmother and father, her mother's sporadic visits, and her sister's struggles with substance abuse. Geller portrays how much of a vice-grip family can have on your heart, no matter how much it hurts. Dog Flowers is not an easy read, but certainly a captivating and resolute one.

"You cannot wake a person who is pretending to be asleep." (Navajo Proverb)

Danielle Geller presents her heart-wrenching memoir revisiting life as she knew it growing up on a Navajo reservation. As the story unfolds, we will experience the deep imprint of her childhood and young adulthood leaving its jagged edges in those tender places. Geller recalls those moments of abuse, abandonment, hopelessness, and the gnawing desire for affirmation in her world painted with upheaval and constant insecurities.

A phone call comes through informing Danielle that her mother, Lauren Tweety Lee, is dying in a Florida hospital. Danielle is torn by the weight of it. It wracks her soul to revisit the agony of the downward spiral of a life thrown to the castaway winds. But she makes the decision to go and to stand before this constantly deteriorating altar of motherhood. Tweety left Danielle and her two sisters, Eileen and Alexandra, forever in the throes of alcoholism and the swinging door of available men. The girls were tossed between life with their alcoholic father and life with their stern grandmother.

Danielle begs Eileen to accompany her to Florida. But true to herself, Eileen has a myriad of excuses. She also faces a broken probation in Montana. Eileen took to the road many years ago and hasn't looked back.

And it's a waterfall of regrets and dark memories that reach out to Danielle as she comes face-to-face with her mother in that hospital bed. And what she is left with is a tattered suitcase that belonged to Tweety stuffed with letters, receipts, diaries, and photos depicting a life that stopped short at forty-nine.

The irony of life is that Danielle had broken free and became a library archivist after much struggle in her young adult years. But how would she make sense of all this personal memorabilia before her? It would be months before she could bring herself to lift the lid and shine light upon its contents. Those slips of paper would catapult her into the past once again.

Dog Flowers is heavy. Make no mistake about it. If you're looking for a feather-light read, then this one is not for you. Dog Flowers opens our eyes to the shaky set of cards that we have been dealt. Circumstances lean hard on some of us no matter what. The very ones who should have our backs are the very ones who doom us to a repetitive life of much the same. Intervention often arrives on the midnight train, or sadly, not at all. It's a reminder of how ineffectively the stars are all aligned.

Dog Flowers is written in a no-frills fashion and Geller makes no bones about that. But Dog Flowers is a poignant reminder of gems unable to allow the sun to shine through.

I received a copy of Dog Flowers through NetGalley for an honest review. My thanks to Random House and to Danielle Geller for the opportunity.

Danielle Geller is a young and gifted writer, she shares her family's story ranging across America from her father's home state of Florida to the reservation her Navajo mother ran away from in New Mexico and many other places some more humble or stable than others, where she and her sister Eileen called home, or were housed. Paradoxically, this is a beautiful memoir of particular grief, "I was not trying to learn how to grieve my mother; I have been grieving her absence my entire life. I was ghost-sick. Possessed." Geller artfully archives pieces of her mother's life, and chronicles her own travels and those of her family's, the progress as well as the setbacks, in a way that is more spiritual and therapeutic than chronological. "It felt right that my childhood home was in ruins. I was only grateful I had been able to say goodbye".

Danielle Geller's memoir, Dog Flowers is heart breaking and sad, to say the least. Describing generational alcoholism, addiction and abuse, the author nevertheless pushes through her upbringing to connect to her mother's Navajo family. I did find the narrative hard to follow at times, and difficult to keep all the people and relationships straight. An interesting read.