First published 2010
Michael Patrick MacDonald watches his mother play accordion in their Southie apartment, her miniskirt a defiant splash of color against the neighborhood's harsh realities. Around them, South Boston struggles with white poverty more concentrated than anywhere else in America. Whitey Bulger's criminal operations cast shadows over the streets while busing riots tear at the community's fabric. MacDonald's Ma raises eleven children alone, but tragedy strikes repeatedly as four of them die young. The neighborhood's code of silence presses down on survivors, making grief a solitary burden. MacDonald fights against this suffocating quiet as he witnesses his family's pain and his community's denial. He must choose between loyalty to Southie's unwritten rules and the need to speak truth about what he has seen.
Genres: american-fiction, 20th-century, social-issues, biography-memoir, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, grief
Setting: Southie, South Boston
Period: 20th-century
296 pages · Kindle Edition · Beacon Press
Content warnings: death