Review of Bandit: A Daughter’s Memoir by Molly Brodak

I had problems with this book, but I still want to give it four out of five stars. It’s strange. I could give you a list of things about this book that I just didn’t like: there were sentences I read and read and read again and still my brain couldn’t compute what these sentences were trying to say; the narrative voice seemed so distant from the reader, just like in some other books written by poets (I’m talking about you The Sentamentalists); the philosophical interludes do nothing for me; it’s real, so there’s no true resolution because real life is messy and uncomfortable and nothing ever works out the way it should, so in the end, one finishes the book feeling unsatisfied.

But then, while reading it, Geoff and I sat up in bed and tried to remember the names and locations of baseball teams. I haven’t watched baseball in years, since they went on strike in the early 1990s. But I sat in bed and just listed off team after team while Geoff said How do you know all this? Because it’s from my childhood. It isn’t even knowing so much as just thereing: it is there in my brain and I did nothing on purpose to put it there.

Maybe that’s why, for all its faults, I give Bandit four stars. It’s the thereing in Brodak’s brain that comes across in the prose. She didn’t chose this, but it’s all there. One after another, laid out, for the reader. That’s really all I can think of to say, to justify my ranking, because everything else I can think of to say is negative.

I don’t know.

Bandit: A Daughter’s Memoir by Molly Brodak went on sale October 4, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.