The story begins easily enough with a simple phone call from author Steve Luxenberg's brother Jeff, asking, "Who the heck is Annie?"  It seems he has received a solicitation from a cemetery to plant flowers on three grave sites.  Not two, as might be expected, but three—their grandparents and someone named Annie.

Thus began the journey Steve undertook to find out the truth about what had happened to his aunt, and why she lived nearly all of her adult life in a mental institution.  His mother had always insisted that she was an only child.  It was practically her mantra, and she told nearly everyone she ever met, "I am an only child."  Now Steve was on a mission to find out why his mother had lied about her sister with such determination.  There had been a slip up a few years before his mother died when she confided that, yes, she did have a sister once, but that her sister was both mentally and physically disabled and had died in 1972.  His mother, called Beth, suffered from fragile health, and that hindered Steve and his siblings in asking her any more questions about Annie.  Now Annie was about to make her life known, but not without a lot of digging on Steve's part.

Being a journalist gave Steve a leg up on knowing how to go about his search for the elusive truth about his aunt.  Yet it remained a personal journey and one that he would pursue with a vengeance.  As he uncovered the rather painful truth about his own mother, more and more secrets bubbled to the surface, and the reader has a clear sense of just how unnerving and disturbing this was to the author.

The book is powerfully written and explores not only what happened to his aunt and his family, but also the psyche. the very nature of this family, which was to ignore the past and hide things that were less than perfect according to society's standards at that time, and pretend that all was well all the time.

There is so very much more to this story than I can possibly share in this review; suffice it to say it is a most satisfying read intellectually and emotionally.  I would recommend this book to biography readers, people interested in the mental health system of the early 1900s, and those affected by things ranging from The Holocaust to The Depression.

A gripping, masterful book, I highly recommend it—it will touch you one way or the other.