*I was sent a free ARC of this book by Flatiron books in exchange for an honest review*

Ashley C. Ford’s raw and honest memoir tells her story of growing up poor in Indiana with an incarcerated father and abusive mother. She details her adolescence, including her growing and important relationship with her grandmother, the assault she suffered at the hands of her first boyfriend, and her journey to becoming a first-generation college student. All the while, she ruminates on her father’s absence and her inability to connect with him as she grows up.

Filled with complexity and nuance, Ford does a good job of probing the multiple intersections of her identity. This is not singularly a book about race, about family, or about violence, but all of these aspects are crucial to Ford’s development. The book’s strongest points lie in her recollections of her family, particularly the way her relationship with her grandmother starkly contrasts that with her mother. The effect of such comes fully into focus as she visits her grandmother on her deathbed. Though the memoir begins rather disjointed and uncertain, it finds its way around the 60% mark.

Although this memoir covers an array of topics, it felt as if it was missing some constant thread to weave its different aspects together. It read like several patches not quite sewn together to make a quilt, but also not quite essays that could stand on their own. The book is marketed as if Ford’s incarcerated father is the continuing thread, but his portions actually take up very little of the book and remarkably little time is spent reconciling with his actions on the page once Ford becomes aware of the wrongdoings that landed him in prison. This was a disappointment and really soured my view of the book as a whole.

Additionally, the prose could use editing and there are many moments that Ford ventures into unnecessary tangents or anecdotes that don’t turn out to serve the book as a whole. I think this would have benefitted from a more critical eye in the revision process.

Ultimately, while this novel was set up to be great, I’m left giving it just a middling rating.

Ashley C. Ford is a very mature, thoughtful, and reflective writer. This is the story of her broken family: an abusive mother, an incarcerated father, and a loving grandmother. She survives abuse and sexual assault, renews her relationship with her father, and learns to fall in love with herself and others. I recommend the audiobook.

Raw, vulnerable and unflinching in its portrayal of family trauma, Ford's writing is personal and profound.

There's a lot that's really powerful and important about this memoir. Ford is clearly a talented, smart writer and she deserves credit for tackling a lot of really serious and pertinent issues in society: sexual violence, poverty, racism, and the long-term fallout of incarceration and families. As someone whose also had incarcerated family members, however, I struggled with how to feel after reading the book--I expected for the narrator to involve her father more directly throughout the book, instead of just in the beginning, a spot in the middle, end at the end. The narrator never really discusses her father's crimes with him (or anyone) or really analyzes them through the context of being a survivor of violence herself. I also felt at the last scene with her father, the story is wrapped up pretty neatly, with him giving his blessing for her to write about him in whatever way she wants. That's lovely, of course, but felt a little too simplistic to me. These are not questions I would necessarily expect to have an answer to, but because the book was marketed and presented as one dealing so closely with the incarcerated parent storyline, I was surprised to see so much involved the past and not the present. That said, the past (and in fact, the writer's entire life) *does* involve incarceration, in that the absence of dad is seriously felt in family dynamics, money, mom's boyfriends, etc. I definitely still recommend this book and think Ford accomplished something special and new, but my own lived experiences make it a little tough and conflicting for me to decide whether it worked perfectly for me or not overall.

Ms. Ford’s unflinching honesty in delivering her truth to the page is laudable. This book was at times so difficult to absorb that I had to take pauses for both breath and thought; one can only imagine what it must have been like for the author to revisit these memories in the process of writing of this often searingly painful narrative. The author brought out each character in their full human complexity, with none being completely virtuous nor villainous; though she was the victim of manifold horrors over the course of her young life she still manages to find profound compassion for the flaws that turned the people who hurt her most into the people that they were. It is hard to successfully translate that into literary understanding that readers accurately absorb, but this author does this, and by the end of the book I found myself hurting not only for the author, but for all of the people along the way in her narrative who couldn’t seem to get out of their own ways despite their best efforts. I read it in one long sitting, unable to fully put it down despite my many pauses over the course of reading it, and I hope that it carries the meaning for other readers that it ended up holding for me. I very much look forward to continuing to follow this author in future.

Many thanks to NetGalley for the ARC that allowed me to review this book!

An honest, detailed account of child abuse and continuing to love your family members despite their flaws.

Searing, sad, and in many places, unexpectedly poetic. An engrossing, important read. I have already talked about it on social media as being one of my favorite reads, and certainly my favorite memoir, of the year.