As the characters come together, they’re forced to reckon with their family’s troubled legacy, and they try, with mixed results, to come to terms with their shared history. Most of the characters in the novel are survivors of horrific abuse, some of it at the hands of the monstrous Helen Jean, who was herself abused as a child. “Something that no one could love.” And then there’s Julie B.’s niece, Lydia, who lives in Dallas and is struggling with marital problems and the loss of three pregnancies.

Jan’s brother, Alex, is a police officer who’s haunted by nightmares about being raped by his uncle and is dealing with his own shadowy past: “There was something broken in me,” he reflects. Jan is raising her own two kids and dreams of escaping Jerusalem and going to college in Dallas she’s sustained by her born-again Christianity. has two children, each struggling in their own way. There’s Julie B., Helen Jean’s only surviving child, who’s 61 and is “just now figuring out” she realizes she’s spent most of her life in denial. Watkins’ debut follows four members of a family who reunite in their hometown of Jerusalem, Texas, to say goodbye-or something like it-to their ailing matriarch, Helen Jean, who’s hospitalized and not expected to make it out. “Something killed the fight in us.” That’s an understatement. “We give up easy,” says one character to her cousin.

A Texas family deals with a long history of abuse.

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