Sorry to Disrupt the Peace

Starred review from November 21, 2016
In Cottrell’s stellar debut novel, 32-year-old Helen is in her Manhattan apartment when she receives a call that her adoptive brother has killed himself. Helen, who like her brother is Korean and was adopted by the same white Milwaukee couple, is shaken by the news and books a one-way ticket to Milwaukee to find out what happened. But what starts as a detective’s hunt for clues soon becomes Helen’s confrontation of her own place in the world—why she’s estranged from her past (she hasn’t seen her adoptive parents in five years), and what she is doing with her life as a counselor for troubled youth. Finally, Helen comes to terms with her adoptive brother’s suicide. The real attraction here is Helen: her perspective ranges from sharp (New York is “a city so rich it funds poetry”) to askew (“People who call themselves photographers are fake... the real charlatans of our time. Behind a photo is a perfectly fake person, scrubbed of all flaws, dead inside”) to unhinged (her adoptive parents’ grieving takes the physical form of a middle-aged European man who walks around the house and helps himself to pizza). Cottrell gives Helen the impossible task of understanding what would drive another person to suicide, and the result is complex and mysterious, yet, in the end, deeply human and empathetic. Agent: Kate Johnson, Wolf Literary.

February 1, 2017
Sitting on the brand-new couchher roommate'sin her shared studio apartment in Manhattan, Helen gets a call from her Uncle Geoff. (She has an Uncle Geoff?) Her younger brother has died; he killed himself. Her adoptive parents aren't expecting hershe's missed years' worth of holidays at this pointbut she decides to go back to her suburban Milwaukee home and attend the funeral, for their sake. Why did her brother, also adopted, she never forgets to add, though from a different Korean family, take his own life? Helen launches an investigation, and as she examines the past and ambles through her home and town in search of clues, we see in her actions and others' responses that she's unhinged, perhaps ill, or at the very least unreliable, despite the nickname Sister Reliability she earned as a caretaker of troubled youth back in New York (a job her family shakes their heads over). Helen's foggy view of reality is a dark, dark comedic well, and debut novelist Cottrell tells her story with gutsy style, glowing sentences, and true feeling.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)