Thank you to Ron Currie and Netgalley for the advance copy, provided in exchange for an honest review.

This book was such a journey. I had no idea what to expect, because I clicked that "request" button on Netgalley the second I saw Ron Currie had a new book out. I had a moment with one of Currie's early books, Everything Matters! when I was in my early 20's, and thought this book was one of the most deeply profound things I had ever read, and obsessively recommended it to everyone, including one of my best friends, and have been following him as an author ever since. (side note, the author is a very cool dude, i once contacted him about a signed copy about one of his books i was wanting to purchase as a gift, and he was not selling them at the time. instead, i bought a book, mailed it to him, and he signed it and mailed it back. we might even still be facebook friends. he also went to the same college as I did - very cool dude indeed.)

anyway, that has no bearing on my review. which is primarily that the description of this book absolutely does not do it justice. This book is listed as a mystery - thriller, and it does have a mystery, and there are definitely thrilling parts. But truly, this book is more than that. It's a deep and often dark look at a French-Canadian family living in small-town Waterville, Maine - where the author is actually from. But this book is at its heart, a character driven story about a group of people who are doing the best they can while dealing with a fascinating and tragic blend of racism, classism, xenophobia, mental health issues and addiction.

The plot revolves around the titular character Babs Dionne, but her story, from start to finish, is mostly told through the eyes of her family, particularly her daughter Lori, as well as her grandson and a few others. All of the characters are, quite frankly, fucked up, and many of them are well developed to the point that any of them could carry their own books.

The history of the area is quite frankly, horrifying, and well researched, and even though I spent 6 years of my childhood in a city not too far from Waterville, I was completely ignorant of the historical treatment of the French Canadians in New England. Babs is from Little Canada, a presumably real area of Waterville that was home to French-Canadian immigrants who primarily worked in the Hathaway Shirt factory. Though I haven't been back to the Northeast in years, I have driven through enough of these run down backwater, half-abandoned mill towns that although there are some mild supernatural elements, the rest of the story requires almost no suspension of belief. It's almost like there are people like this in every Smalltown USA. Which is... sad, and thought provoking.

"So, Abigail - if I may call you Abigail- I am here to tell you that life, as it's actually lived, does not fit into your neat little black-and-white categories. And I ask you, please, to stop being so certain of what I am and am not, what I have and have not endured. If you look at me and see a white woman, that's your mistake. Whatever sins go along with being white, don't pin them on me- I've been running from white people my whole life, like most everyone else on the planet."