“There is no such thing as closure in the world, just more answers that lead to more questions.” This is a hard but very accurate truth about the human experience, whether it’s trying to piece together a series of confusing and life-altering events or attempting to figure out your identity and your purpose.
Maria, the protagonist of Robert Hoffman’s family drama novel, Taken to the Grave, learns this as she pieces together her family history and learns of her and her parents’ actual history through her research. Unfortunately, these new truths open up more questions, many that cannot be answered because, as the title suggests, they were taken to the grave.
Below is my review of the novel followed by an interview with Hoffman about his book and writing process. Then, enter to win a copy of the book via the SweepWidget form below!
Taken to the Grave plot summary
Maria Abrams falls down the rabbit hole of tracing her family history. However, when her niece, Annie, the daughter of her twin brother, Michael, gifts her a DNA test, she doesn’t realize that the results will lead to her uncovering a family secret that their late mother never meant for them to learn.
The story
Taken to the Grave is essentially a family drama filled with twists and turns, a bit of mystery, and even a bit of a supernatural element. Essentially, though, it’s a chronicle of the Lombardi family primarily told through the eyes of Annie and Maria’s husband, Mark.
This story shows the generational divides and how family members from different eras handle life’s challenges. It shows how secrets can unearth themselves with time and how it can blindside and alter even those who aren’t directly affected by them.
The characters
The two narrators are odd choices for this story, but Hoffman pulls it off well by letting sources close to the main players unravel the mystery in a more objective, yet equally passionate way. They backtrack through the personal histories of Maria and Michael’s parents, Lawrence and Sofia, giving the reader a solid baseline knowledge of the trials and tribulations of the family matriarch and patriarch.
The family history feels very real and is told with such convincing detail that it feels like the reader is actually reading an actual memoir. Hoffman’s narrators paint a picture of this family from a very reflective lens. We learn to love the characters, flaws and all, so that when the surprise bomb drops, we’re willing to go along for the ride to uncover the mysterious sequence of events that leads to this revelation and the individual characters’ responses to this news.
The characters in this story make up the diverse cast that encompass every family. Maria is the genealogical sleuth. She’s tenacious and curious about her family history, and she feels closely connected to it. Meanwhile, Michael couldn’t be less interested, preferring the version of his family that he has always known, warts and all.
Mark is an interesting element to the story. Though not a blood relative, he’s heavily invested in this family and writes about them like a scientist studying a new lifeform. He has a lot of love and respect for the entire family, and he struggles with balancing his support of Maria with his support of the rest of the Lombardi clan.
My recommendation
Taken to the Grave is a page turner that definitely kept me guessing. It didn’t try to shock or over dramatize any of the elements. It felt very real and organic and full of well-rounded characters that I rooted for, both the living and the dead. It mixed genres effortlessly while essentially remaining grounded and focused on its message.
We don’t get to pick out family, but we do get to choose how they influence us. We also have to come to terms with the limitations of the past and the evolution of human relationships that can make certain choices hard to deal with over time.
But when you’re living in the moment, your choices are based on that moment, not its future consequences. That’s something that this story understands so well and presents to the reader with harsh yet important truths that they can connect to their own histories. And sometimes it takes time, even more time than we may even have, to take that all in.
My rating
Enter the giveaway!
An interview with Robert Hoffman
What is your writing background?
I started writing in high school for the school paper and then in college. I had my own column in college called “The Hoffman Files.” I loved doing it and tried to get a job as a writer but was unsuccessful and eventually took a different turn and became a social studies teacher, which was my career.
I got into blogging around 2013 and had my blog picked up by the local paper, The Times Union of Albany. I did that for about seven years. I started tiring of it and decided to try my hand at writing fiction.
How did that background play into developing Taken To The Grave?
I published my first book in 2021 called Blind Spot. It was the story of a middle-aged family man who had a good life but found himself living next door to an elderly German immigrant woman who drove him crazy. One day rushing out of a supermarket to avoid her, he accidentally runs her over with his car, badly wounding her. He gets guilted into helping take care of her, and an unlikely friendship develops.
Once this was done, I was onto my next book. I was inspired by my wife’s unexpected surprise regarding her “origin story,” and that became the inspiration for Taken to the Grave.
Did you plot this story out in advance, or did it develop as you wrote?
I had a rough outline in my head of where I wanted it to go and put together the chapter titles. They typically get moved around, and sometimes chapters are added along the way. So, I’d say a little of both.
Did you do any research while writing this book? If so, was there any information that you came across that you found interesting but may not have made its way into the book?
The book began as a history of the city of Jamestown, New York. It’s my wife’s hometown and I wanted to discuss how it developed, the story of its Swedish and Italian immigrants and how they shaped the city, its heyday and decline from being a manufacturing city, and how its history came to shape my wife and her family.
In learning about the Italian immigration story, I learned that unlike most immigrant groups, Italians frequently went back and forth to Italy, whereas most who came here, stayed for good. Ultimately, that story became too big and too confusing, so I ended up scaling way back on the history and focused on her family.
Have you ever taken a DNA test? Did it ever lead you to making contact with distant family members? Did it make you feel closer to your heritage, both the known and unknown elements?
I did. My wife asked if I wanted to, and so I did and I discovered that I was 100% Askenazi Jewish from Ukraine. I’m not sure it made me feel any closer to my heritage since the Ukraine has been so torn by war, civil war, disease, famine, Hitler, Stalin, communism etc…that records are hard to come by, but a distant relative did reach out to me a couple of years ago, and I saw a picture of my great grandfather and great grandmother for the first time and learned about what their life was like in Ukraine, and it was pretty fascinating.
Have you ever visited a psychic medium like Maria did? If so, did you incorporate your experience into the fictional one portrayed in the book? What did you want the medium elements to bring to the story?
I never had visited a medium, but like Maria in the story, my wife did. Some of the things that she learned from the medium are in the book, other elements are made up.
It’s not something that I necessarily would ever do and like Maria. It was totally out of character for my mostly logical wife.
I wanted the medium to plug in some of the gaps that were missing for Maria since her mother, father and her Leo Esposito were long deceased and the medium became a way to plant “bird seeds” for her to follow. In other words, her visit gave her just enough to keep looking when it appeared that she had reached a complete dead end in her search.
How did you decide which characters would narrate the story?
The early drafts of the book had multiple narrators, six or seven at least. It became too much and too confusing and too repetitive with too many people repeating the same story. I settled on what my editor thought were the two most interesting characters, the husband Mark who had to live with the fallout of Maria’s experience and her niece Annie, who was there as a confident to her aunt, as well as somebody who could represent Maria’s side of the family.
Were any of the narrators more challenging to write than others?
Writing Annie was much more challenging since writing in the voice of a 21-year-old woman is quite a challenge for a 61 year old man. There are certain things that men say and certain ways in which we think that obviously differ from a young woman, so trying to make her voice seem believable was very challenging.
Do you have a favorite character?
I guess it’s Mark, since he’s roughly based on me, and he provides most of the comic relief, but I also liked Candace the sister-in-law who was kind of a snarky, stuck up you know what, and that was a fun part to write.
What advice do you have for readers who may want to reach out to long lost family members but may be apprehensive about doing so?
Be careful what you ask for. Lol. More and more of these experiences end up providing unwanted or at least unexpected surprises.
Some people, like Maria, have a need to know and the only way to satisfy that is to do some digging, so the DNA tests that are out there do provide some of those answers, but as Maria found out, as well as my wife, it can provide more questions than answers.
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