Helene Stapinski: Five finger discount: A crooked family history

By MARGIE THOMSON

In the opening two paragraphs of her family memoir, Stapinski has one grandfather try to kill her, and the other hit over the head and killed during a burglary.

She offers such a litany of petty theft, misery, hatred and struggle in the pages to follow that you would be forgiven for thinking this sounds a dreadful book, too depressing to contemplate.

Yet, in the same way that Frank McCourt made Irish poverty moving without masking its horror, Stapinski has a gift for making sweet, funny and captivating events that were chilling and destructive.

If you want to repeat your Angela's Ashes experience - albeit with a Jersey City tale of petty mob violence, Italian and Polish men with out-of-control tempers, and one girl who wants to move so far away that her mother won't find her - this is the book. It's terrific.

Bloomsbury

$36.95