Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

In this novelistic debut, a poor girl with a rich pedigree remembers coming-of-age in the decaying shell of her family's once-grand Hudson Valley home. By the time Aldrich's grandparents inherited the Rokeby estate, their branch of a dynasty that included the 19th-century trader John Jacob Astor had lost almost all its wealth except for the 450-acre lot on the Hudson that had been in the family since the 1680s. Three hundred years later, when this memoir opens, the 10-year-old Aldrich and her destitute parents shared the elegantly crumbling mansion with her better-off aunt and uncle and two younger cousins. Her alcoholic grandmother and a pampered Labrador retriever shared a less-opulent guesthouse of more recent vintage, and a motley assortment of transients and bohemians lived rent-free, courtesy of her father Teddy's generosity (or inability to say no), in various outbuildings scattered around the property. A bright and sensitive girl on the doorstep of puberty, Aldrich was just beginning to feel the sting of shame associated with being the child of the charming but feckless Teddy, who, though educated at the best schools, had no skills or desires to be anything but the lord of Rokeby, and his beautiful, sharp-tongued wife. Her shame only increased when Teddy welcomed a mysterious French woman named Giselle into the fold. Rokeby had once been a paradise for Aldrich. With its scandalous secrets, it was becoming more like a prison she longed to escape through the auspices of a hypothetical unknown wealthy aunt or through her own skill at the violin. It's a trick to tell a story this rich and complicated through the eyes of a child without losing the subtleties of character and nuances of history, but Aldrich pulls it off with aplomb. Vividly gothic family romance.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Publishers Weekly
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In a sparklingly mischievous debut, Aldrich peers into the intimate collapse of a once great Hudson River house-the "funny farm" of her Astor/Livingston/Chanler relatives. Spiraling way down from a long line of enterprising early Americans, financiers, socialites, and artists with illustriously entangled names, author Aldrich, whose great-grandfather was the famous music critic Richard Aldrich, reconstructs her early years growing up at the ancestral homestead of Rokeby, a 43-room mansion with numerous outlying towers and barns located on 450 acres somewhere along the Hudson River between New York City and Albany (though she never says where exactly, it is in Barryown, N.Y.). The fierce guardians of the house's aristocratic legacy, exemplified by great-grandmother Margaret Chanler, who banished relatives who had divorced or converted to Catholicism, had passed by the 1980s when Aldrich was growing up at Rokeby to a generation of impoverished, disorderly parasites, alcoholics, and madmen. Her own father, called Teddy, a Harvard-educated handyman, seemed to delight in his "deliberate defiance" of his familial responsibility and refused to make a living, preferring to ride around on the backhoe, while her Polish-born peasant artist mother, Ala, was frequently depressed and resistant to any involvement in her only daughter's school or life. Thus the young girl longed for order and stability and even a square meal, which she found occasionally at her Grandma Claire's quarters, when the old matriarch wasn't "sucking on the bottle." Aldrich's narrative tidily and fondly bears witness to the inexorable unraveling of a storied genealogy. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Aldrich bears witness to the tail-end of the disintegration of that most storied of American dynasties, the Astors. Growing up at Rokeby, the crumbling, 43-room family mansion on the Hudson River, she had ample opportunity to observe and participate in the eccentricities of her once mighty clan. Interweaving recollections from her dysfunctional childhood and tales of glories past, she accurately captures and communicates the madness and malaise that have infected many members of the last few generations of Astors, including her own father. Refusing to move on and clinging to a decaying ancestral estate that could very well save them all, they live a hand-to-mouth existence, buoyed only by their obsession with their heritage and a misplaced sense of entitlement. This unflinching memoir of childhood chaos and neglect is relieved and enlivened by Aldrich's wittily sharp observations and her obvious affection for her peculiar relations.--Flanagan, Margaret Copyright 2010 Booklist