On a sweltering June night in 1959, Betty O"Malley died from lymphatic cancer, leaving behind an alcoholic husband and eight shell-shocked children-seven sons and one daughter, ranging in age from two to fifteen years. The daughter, Carole, was thirteen at the time. In this poignant memoir, she recalls in vivid detail the chaotic course of her family life over the next four years. The setting for the story is Hungry Hill, an Irish-Catholic working-class neighborhood in Springfield, Massachusetts. Grief-stricken over his wife"s death, Joe O"Malley, a mid-level executive at an insurance company, spends his nights on the living room sofa listening to the sentimental ballads of Frank Sinatra, a tumbler of whiskey always nearby. At first Carole struggles to pull her father back from his world of teary, booze-soaked memories. Slipping into her mother"s role, she "holds the fort" and works at keeping her seven brothers in line, straining to give the shaky household a semblance of...