Review: Sorry to Disrupt the Peace by Patty Yumi Cottrell

Helen, 32 and barely holding her New York City life together, is in the middle of an Ikea couch delivery when she gets a call from her uncle in Milwaukee. Her adoptive brother has just committed suicide Shocked she collapses on the new furniture and between sobs she comes up with a plan.

Helen will go and investigate the death of her brother. So she travels to her estranged adoptive family in Milwaukee to make sense of it all. She talks to a few people, tries to reconnect with her family and be of use to them in this dark time. She fails miserably on almost all accounts but mostly on reconnecting with her family.

I haven’t really read a novel about estrangement in the family but this seemed to be on point. Helen and her parents have lost all common ground, they are strangers to each other, each with their own agenda, unable or unwilling to bring these together. Through the course of the novel however it becomes clear that Helen might not be the most reliable narrator, especially not when it comes to judging other peoples feelings. She starts off as a very emotional and caring character but the better the reader gets to know her, the more screwed up she becomes. She is definitely an entertaining antihero, unable to navigate through life. She dresses in shoes she found in the garbage, buys drugs for the troubled youth in her position as counsellor and ruins every interpersonal relationship by not being able to interpret emotions properly.

The novel waffles between being very funny and extremely claustrophobic. Sometimes I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to feel or if I could trust Helen in her judgement of the situation. The novel could be read as either a satire on being a narcissistic and (undiagnosed) mentally ill person with or it could be read as the struggle of a daughter trying to reconnect with her adoptive parents.

I felt that I got a lot out of this novel, I liked how nuanced the writing was how it is up to me to attribute the appropriate emotions. Hopefully I’ll be better at this than Helen.