She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me

I assigned this to two groups of students while covering a memoir unit. Both groups and I all agree that this book is not really worth the read. First of all, the synopsis on the back cover is misleading. It leads you to believe that the book will be full of mystery and excitement, when it is in fact just the opposite. The “mystery” of the writer's mother's secretive life is revealed at the beginning of the book. The remainder consists of the writer traveling to meet her mothers' siblings and cousins, and she recounts basically the same event: the writer's paternal grandfather's severe physical and sexual abuse of the siblings. While the book evokes sympathy from the reader, there is a lot of overkill with the details of the sexual abuse. There are only so many of those details that are necessary to get the point across.