Down City

Starred review from March 6, 2017
In this somber, moving blend of memoir and reportage, native Rhode Islander Carroll confronts the ghosts of her parentsâtwo bright, charming, and extremely damaged people, both talented amateur photographers and addicts. Carroll's Jewish mother, carefree and reckless, was snorting cocaine in a motel room with two mafia toughs when they strangled her at age 30. Carroll's Irish-Catholic father, a charismatic autodidact, turned to alcohol after serving in the Vietnam War and was found dead, possibly by his own hand, in a flophouse at 48. Carroll intensively researches their deaths, going so far as to examine her father's autopsy report and interview the imprisoned son of her mother's killer. She explores how they lived while also recounting her troubled childhood. "Down city," a term used by locals to describe central Providence, circumscribes the decaying realm of blue-collar jobs and rough taverns in which her parents lived and died. Carroll's understated prose complements this daunting material, and her struggles as an unhappy, rebellious teen seem almost idyllic in contrast to the dysfunction and tragedy that shadow her. Nevertheless, Carroll's determined grappling with the burden of her past is honestly and skillfully done.

January 15, 2017
A debut memoirist tells the story of her mother's brutal murder and her difficult relationship with her father, who followed his wife to the grave 14 years later.When Carroll was 4 years old, police discovered the body of her mother, Joan, on the side of the highway. Fourteen years later, they found her father, Kevin, who had died from an enlarged heart and liver disease, in a room in a cheap Rhode Island hotel. The question of who her parents were and how they had come to such tragic ends haunted Carroll into adulthood. Determined to find answers, she scoured her memory, newspaper accounts, and police records for clues and interviewed people who had known them both. Carroll speculates that her cocaine-addicted mother got involved with drugs through her father, a man who may have given Joan pills from the "collection" he took to manage mental illness. Joan's addiction eventually led to ties with the Mafia drug lord who killed her out of fear she would turn him in to the police. Not long after his first wife's death, Kevin remarried and moved the family from Providence to Barrington, an upscale Rhode Island town that made them all feel "normal and wealthy and safe." Yet alcoholism and manic depression took their tolls. Kevin and his new wife eventually divorced, while Carroll moved between homes and through high school in a haze of angst-ridden confusion. Yet it was after her father's death that she was finally able to "reinvent [herself] as wholesome, and capable" and begin the long, difficult task of making sense of her family's tragic history. Unsentimental and simply told, Carroll's quietly powerful story offers a courageous, cleareyed vision of a broken family while exploring the meaning of forgiveness. An honest and probing memoir of coming to terms with family.

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January 1, 2018

It can't have been easy growing up the daughter of a cocaine addict who was executed in a sordid hit sanctioned by the Rhode Island mob in 1984. Carroll's memoir reveals the scarring effect of losing her mother, a petite Jewish woman who loved her child, photography, dogs, and drugs. The motherless four-year-old grew into a writer who pursued the truth about the murder, which was sloppily prosecuted by a system more interested in evidence of organized crime than justice. Carroll combines information she learned from police, court, and medical examiner records with anecdotes and family revelations about Joan Carroll. Carroll's father had issues of his own, namely his struggles with alcohol. Kevin Carroll was a trusted and charismatic longtime employee of the Providence Journal, but Leah, world-weary and skeptical by the age of 18, wasn't shocked when her father was found dead in a flophouse. Carroll's clear writing is authentic, but her tale is not as arresting as other memoirs of growing up victimized, such as Cylin and John Busby's The Year We Disappeared or Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle. Still, this one will find an audience among young adults. VERDICT Recommend to readers of gritty true crime or memoirs of hard-luck childhoods.-Suzanne Gordon, Lanier High School, Gwinnett County, GA

Copyright 2018 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 15, 2017
When Carroll was four, her mother was missing for several months before her body was found, off the side of a highway a state away from their home in Rhode Island. Years later, her father, long suffering from depression and alcoholism, was gone, too. For the traumatic parental losses, Carroll divides her first book into two parts: her long-simmering inquiry into the murder of the mother she barely knew and her account of the brilliant, charming, Vietnam-veteran father she watched diminish. In recording the outsize tragedies of her small family, Carroll maps the social topography of her small state ( down city denotes a Providence neighborhood), contextualizes organized crime's power thereas well as its involvement in her mother's deathand tells an intersecting story of print journalism's significance and demise. Using the present tense to narrate past experiences, Carroll grasps fleeting moments and memories with confidence and disarming delicacy. We're witness to her animal-loving, addiction-addled mother, an amateur photographer whose photos Carroll includes here; her handsome, beguiling newspaperman father; and young Carroll herself, writing poetry through the classes she's flunking. So rich in mood, feeling, and genuine love, this investigative memoir is a true tribute.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)