A review by meghan111
Sorry to Disrupt the Peace by Patrick Cottrell

3.0

An affecting novel with an oddball & unique narrator. Helen Moran is 32, living in New York and working as a counselor for troubled youth, wearing clothes she finds discarded on the street. Korean born, she hasn't seen her white, Midwestern adopted parents in five years. Helen is weird, troubled, isolated, and under investigation at her job for her unorthodox ways of helping the troubled youth, involving marijuana and 24 hour cell phone availability. When she gets a phone call that her adopted brother has committed suicide, she decides to travel back to her childhood home to investigate. Her adopted parents seem surprised to see her, and she starts trying to figure out the cause of her brother's suicide. By the end, this is a moving story of the suicide of a family member, sincere, complex, and sad. Along the way, Helen is obviously deeply eccentric and has an interior world unfamiliar to most people - sometimes this is funny, sometimes it makes you question the narrator's reliability.