fictionwriter 's review for:

Sinkhole by Juliet Patterson

4.0

---

I found this book particularly moving as I read it while visiting Pittsburg, Kansas, my husband’s hometown. We were there to memorialize his brother, who had died a month before. Pittsburg is unique. It is a small coal mining town in the southeast corner of Kansas, and as my father-in-law explained to me, the only time I met him, the entire town is undermined. I came to understand that word in an entirely new way as he meant that the shafts of abandoned mines tunneled underneath many of the houses in the neighborhood. Some of those houses had fallen into those “sinkholes. Soon after her own father’s suicide, Patterson goes back to this town to research the lives, and deaths of her two grandfathers who also committed suicide. So of course, the sinkholes represent the emotional cratering in her family as two generations endure suicide. It is a moving and eloquent book.