Sorry to Disrupt the Peace

By: Patrick Cottrell

Narrated by: Nancy Wu

Helen Moran is thirty-two years old, single, childless, college educated, and partially employed as a guardian of troubled young people in New York. She is accepting a furniture delivery in her shared studio apartment when her uncle calls to break the news: Helen’s adoptive brother is dead.

According to the Internet, there are six possible reasons why her brother might have killed himself. But Helen knows better: she knows that six reasons is only shorthand for “the abyss.” Helen also knows that she alone is qualified to launch a serious investigation into his death, so she purchases a one-way ticket to Milwaukee. There, as she searches her childhood home and attempts to uncover why someone would choose to die, she will face her estranged family, her brother’s few friends, and the overzealous grief counselor, Chad Lambo; she may also discover what it truly means to be alive.

A bleakly comic tour de force that’s by turns poignant, uproariously funny, and viscerally unsettling, this debut novel has shades of Bernhard, Beckett, and Bowles—and it announces the singular voice of Patrick Cottrell.

©2017 Patty Yumi Cottrell (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Scatalogical, arrogant egotistical character thinks she is cool, but not...

The main character is sarcastic and has an in ordinate interest in vomit shit snot body odor and other assorted gross things. They do not add anything to the story. She is self-centered and immature. She repeatedly used the term “adoptive” to describe her parents her family, herself and her brother. You’ll hear the term at least twice per page and after about the 400th time it got really really boring. The book did not go anywhere and you walk away feeling worse than when you started. I do not recommend this.

Always Surprising

I loved this book, both the writing and the reader. It was more like an off beat, funny tragic indie film than your typical coming of age novel slog.

I like that the narrator, a millennial, is such an individual, and doesn't care if people like her or not.

She is resentful about being a Korean adoptee, placed in a middle American west home, to parents who appear to have done nothing wrong but fail to educate their two adopted Korean kids about Asian culture.

Yet Helen is deeply altruistic, working with troubled young people and living like a pauper. Although, as she lives in New York, she is partly funded by an inheritance from her adoptive, racist grandfather.

Both Helen and her younger brother, whose suicide opens the book, appear to be on some kind of spectrum of asexuality and autism. Her quest through this book is to help her parents get through the funeral and find out why her brother chose to end his life.

Darkly funny, real, and in the end touching. Can't wait for more from this author.