House of Holy Fools: A Family Portrait in Six Cracked Parts

Rating:
Summary: Bravo!
Review: First off, I should admit that I know Amy Biancolli, if only casually, and that I sorely miss her poetic movie reviews in the Albany Times Union. Nonetheless, I believe this book more than stands on its own merits, had you never seen or heard of the author or her family (father was well-known music critic, Louis Biancolli and mother, concert violinist Jeanne Mitchell) before. She writes with startling, poignant, laugh-out-loud as well as put-down-the-book-until-you-can-stop-crying-enough-to-see-the-words-again honesty. It is about Biancolli's brilliant, unusual, and often troubled family--and the deaths of all of them within the space of two years--and it is about herself. It is about grief, religion, music, the struggle for self-definition, and about sorting out all of the above in order to be able to live a sane and happy life. As she puts it on the second-to-last page, "the bass-ackwards beauty of this world is its insistence on the goodness of bad things--its serial transference of death to life, of calamity to joy." After spending 154 pages with her, I believe it, and you will too.