Family
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
I have always been broken. I could have died. And maybe it would have been better if i had.
It is a day like any other when seventeen-year-old Melinda hits the road for San Francisco, leaving behind her fractured home life and a constant assault on her self-esteem. Henry is the handsome, charismatic man who comes upon her, collapsed on a park bench, and offers love, a bright new consciousness, and—best of all—a family. One that will embrace her and give her love. Because family is what Mel has never really had. And this new family, Henry's family, shares everything. They share the chores, their bodies, and their beliefs. And if Mel truly wants to belong, she will share in everything they do. No matter what the family does, or how far they go.
Told in episodic verse, Family is a fictionalized exploration of cult dynamics, loosely based on the Manson Family murders of 1969. It is an unflinching look at people who are born broken, and the lengths they'll go to to make themselves "whole" again.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this novel in verse, based on the Manson Family murders, Ostow (So Punk Rock: And Other Ways to Disappoint Your Mother) delivers the harrowing story of 17-year-old Melinda, who flees to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district to escape her sexually abusive "uncle jack." Weak and unstable, Melinda is seduced by Henry, the charismatic leader of a cult, who presides over a group of lost souls on a remote ranch, and she quickly gets in over her head ("i had that sense about Him, overwhelming, enveloping, cloaking:/ He. was. right./ He was inescapable"). When Henry plots a violent mission, no one can refuse to go along. A mix of pared-down poems and more developed paragraphs of text, the form matches the content, which is dark, mesmerizing, and hazy; the only capital letters are in reference to Henry, emphasizing (if a bit blatantly) his godlike power over his followers. The narrative shifts between Melinda's past, present, and bloody future suggest the inevitability of her descent and mirror the steady pull of the tides and undertows she describes as dragging her down. Ages 14 up.
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