Bandit

By: Molly Brodak

Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller

Length: 7 hrs and 17 mins

Publisher's Summary

In the summer of 1994, when Molly Brodak was 13 years old, her father robbed 11 banks, until the police finally caught up with him while he was sitting at a bar drinking beer, a bag of stolen money plainly visible in the backseat of his parked car. Dubbed the "Mario Brothers Bandit" by the FBI, he served seven years in prison and was released, only to rob another bank several years later and end up back behind bars.

In her powerful, provocative debut memoir, Bandit, Molly Brodak recounts her childhood and attempts to make sense of her complicated relationship with her father, a man she only half knew. At some angles he was a normal father: there was a job at the GM factory, a house with a yard, birthday treats for Molly and her sister. But there were darker glimmers, too - another wife he never mentioned to her mother, late-night rages directed at the TV, the red Corvette that suddenly appeared in the driveway, a gift for her sister. In Bandit, Brodak unearths and reckons with her childhood memories and the fracturing impact her father had on their family - and in the process attempts to make peace with the parts of herself that she inherited from this bewildering, beguiling man.

©2016 Molly Brodak (P)2016 Tantor

Critic Reviews

"Undeniably compelling…An intelligent, disturbing, and profoundly honest memoir." ( Kirkus)

life keenly observed

a fascinating look at youth, memory, family, and storytelling itself. one of those memoirs that critiques memoir while living up to the genre’s potential. the writer is a poet and therefore uses the subject of her life to muse insightfully on memory, money, addiction, forgiveness, love, loneliness, and emotional survival. once i started listening i couldn’t stop

Buy it -- you won't be disappointed

Any additional comments?

This is beautifully written and very hard to put down. You get hooked. I only wish the audio narrator were a little better. She seems to think that if a sentence contains the word "joy" then her voice must be in a rapture when she reads the word, or that she should growl when the subject of anger comes up. That may be a slight exaggeration, but she certainly should use less inflection and trust more in the writing and its ability to evoke the right emotion.In any case, the book is gripping and deep.