Snake Music is a coming-of-age story set in the 1940s and 1950s in an inner-city Catholic neighborhood of Detroit, Michigan. The author, J. Patrick Reilly, describes his struggles to cope with his mother's near-fatal descent into mental illness, his father's alcoholism and early death, his family's desperate financial straits, and a devastating accident that crippled him for several years. In the midst of these challenges, Snake Music shows the redeeming power of a loving mother, good humor, and a love for music. Reilly reveals an old and terrible family secret and its multigenerational...