"Know thyself," said Socrates, and Newton takes this directive to heart in a memoir that strives to not only understand her specific personality but identify its development through multiple generations of ancestors. This knowledge of her family's colorful history, which includes a grandfather who allegedly married 13 times; a demanding, racist father; and a speaking-in-tongues evangelical mother, raises more questions than it answers. Fortunately, the burgeoning industry of internet ancestry research and accessible DNA testing helps Newton affix missing leaves to her family tree. Yet each new data point reveals further avenues of inquiry, rabbit holes that raise doubts about physical traits, emotional vulnerabilities, and mental strengths. In exploring her own background, Newton investigates current theories regarding DNA analysis, inherited trauma, and psychological profiling with Sherlockian verve and an academician's tenacity. Genealogy sleuths often undertake such quests hoping to discover hidden gems buried deep in those census records, such as a direct link to aristocracy or a Founding Father. Newton is just looking for some peace of mind, and her approach may help others realize what a worthy goal that is.

How deep do genetic roots penetrate into an individual's day-to-day life? To answer this question, Newton's debut memoir intermingles her own history and her extensive research in ancestry and genealogy, in a quest to uncover her ancestral path with an eye towards changing the family narrative. She grapples with the somber side of her roots in the Deep South of the United States, including a cycle of traumatic relationships that stubbornly repeats itself against the odds. Newton's study of the histories of genealogy and genetic testing views these tools through a critical lens to reveal how they have been used to maintain a white-supremacist status quo, even as they can also be genuinely helpful for discovering one's background. Newton references recent literature, including works by Morgan Jenkins and Alexander Chee, in her attempt to uncover the different ways in which humans relate to family and historical records, and to answer the question of what our ancestry says about us. VERDICT An engaging and thoroughly researched memoir relaying a family history that is at turns recognizable and abhorrent, as an honest and typical history of American exceptionalism, racism, and misogyny. Will appealing to lovers of memoirs, family secrets, genealogy, and the sociological makeup threading U.S. history.--Kelly Karst

Newton debuts with a masterful mix of memoir and cultural criticism that wrestles with America's ancestry through her own family's complex past. While it's often "cast as a narcissistic Western peculiarity," she argues that "ancestor hunger circles the globe" as people have increasingly begun to search for "a deeper sense of community, less 'I' and more 'we.' " Newton, though, was raised on fanciful stories of her relatives--including a grandfather with 13 ex-wives, and her great-aunt Maude (the inspiration behind Newton's writing pseudonym), who died young in an institution--and tales of murder, witchcraft, and spiritual superstition, all of which she interrogates here with a shrewd eye. As she "search backward" through her family's history in an effort to find redemption and healing, she contextualizes their stories within the nation's history of white supremacy and religious fundamentalism (her mother was a fervent evangelical who believed their "forebears had sinned in such a way as to open the door to a generational curse"). Most affecting is her rendering of her complicated relationship with her father and his own "racist bloodline," likening her existence to "a kind of homegrown eugenics project." The result is a transfixing meditation on the inextricable ways the past informs the present. Agent: Julie Barer, the Book Group. (Mar.)

The current wave of interest in genealogy, heredity, family history, and responsibility for past injustices crescendos in a comprehensive work combining personal narrative and reporting. "Ancestor hunger circles the globe" and "spans millennia," writes blogger, critic, and essayist Newton in her first book. Perhaps her hunger is especially gnawing due to her long-term estrangement from her proudly racist father--and from her holy roller mother for a time, as well. These ruptures seeded a project that grew like a fairy-tale beanstalk, which the author climbs with unflagging energy. She begins with a few burning questions: "Had my mom's father really married thirteen times? Had his father really killed a man with a hay hook?" Then she used Ancestry.com, 23andMe, and many other resources to track down the truth about her family history, which is rife with scoundrels, slave owners, and a 17th-century accused witch. Newton also carefully presents the problems with the accuracy and ethics of these tools. She is particularly interested in intergenerational trauma, epigenetics, and the possibility of inheriting mental illness, and she identifies "patterns across generations that seem nearly supernatural in their virulence." In addition to historical and scientific information, as well as summaries of many relevant books, the author delivers numerous vivid recollections of her childhood and strained family dynamics. "Strangers confided to my mom in parking lots, laughed at her stories in checkout lines, sympathized with her grumbling in waiting rooms," writes Newton. "She was fun, charming, and, so it seemed to me then, indomitable. And yet she'd chosen to tie herself to someone like my dad, who has never to my knowledge charmed anyone." In a rather surprising chapter, the author describes her experiences contacting dead ancestors at an "ancestral lineage healing intensive" and details her ginger approach to cross-cultural practices of ancestor reverence, always conscious of "all the pain I knew my ancestors had caused, outside and inside our family." Exhaustively researched, engagingly presented, and glowing with intelligence and honesty. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.