First published 2013
Domenica Ruta grows up in a trash-filled house on a dead end road north of Boston. Her mother Kathi deals drugs, swings between welfare and sudden wealth, and keeps Domenica home from school to watch Godfather movies and Martin Scorsese films. Kathi tells her daughter this education matters more than classroom learning. The house contains no books, yet Domenica discovers reading on her own. She begins to believe she can escape the world of grudges, self-inflicted disasters, and twisted moral codes that define her mother's life. Domenica navigates her misfit adolescence in the 1990s while battling her own emerging addictions. She must choose between loyalty to her notorious mother and the painful work of breaking away. The story chronicles both her unconventional upbringing and her struggle to overcome the demons she inherited, revealing how love and abandonment intertwine in the necessary act of growing up.
Genres: american-fiction, addiction, autobiography, adolescence
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Boston
Period: 1990s
240 pages · ebook · Spiegel & Grau
Content warnings: addiction, drug-use