FBI Girl : How I Learned to Crack My Father's Code

Rating:
Summary: I read it in one gulp
Review: "His high cheekbones freeze, and for the first time, I see it -- the wild animal in his eyes boring through, something wrecked, in pain all over. The animal is like a ghost caught in a well for centuries, its cry a soundless wail clenched so deep that it shakes you to the bone." (p. 238)

Just one example of the FBI girl's incredible gift of language. I read this book in a gulp, barely coming up for air from beginning to end. I lived with Maura and her family through seven years of their lives in the span of a few hours and I am grateful to have done so. Read this book. They are a family worth knowing.

Rating:
Summary: Dysfunction personified
Review: A poignant, often funny look at the efforts of a loving, wildly imaginative daughter trying to invent an acceptable personna for her uncommunicative father. An FBI agent with a gun in his dresser drawer and a car trunk littered with spent bullet casings, she decides his job is responsible for his excessively secretive nature. It takes years for her to understand even J. Edgar Hoover doesn't demand such unflinching secrecy about every aspect of his agents' private lives. A moving and well-written view of a complicated family.

Rating:
Summary: FBI Girl
Review: A wonderfully poignant, yet very amusing and entertaining acount of Ms. Conlon-McIver's life growing up in middle America. She has a gift of rhetoric. The vivid descriptions--I can still see and smell the trunk of her father's FBI car, and was transported back to my own childhood memories attending my first school dance. I laughed and cried with the joys and anguish of this girl and her family. I truly enjoyed this book and look forward to reading more works by this talented author.

Rating:
Summary: Coming of Age With a Father who doesn't Communicate
Review: Coming of age in the family of an FBI agent. The relationship between the genders, daughter and father is difficult. Perhaps especially so if the father is an FBI agent trained to never talk about his work at home. This seems to mean don't talk about anything at home. The strong silent male. Combine this with the shy sensitive daughter and growing up is difficult.

I suppose that it's difficult for all of us. Most of us grow out of of the family, move away and live our own lives. But most of us don't have the gift of analyzing ourselves so clearly as we grow that we can put the life on paper. This book is not like a mystery that you can't put down. But it's so well written that you develop an empathy that makes you want to help the girl along.

Rating:
Summary: Growing up fifties-style in the seventies
Review: FBI father, Catholic school nuns, big family, sixties-seventies, Downs-syndrome child...I expected yet another story of growing up stifled in the suburbs, with some illicit sex and scandal.

In fact, Conlon-McIver describes a remarkably functional family, bound together by an amazing generosity of spirit. Fascinated by her father's career and her Nancy Drew books, she remembers keeping a log that includes every neighbor's license plate. She wants her father to bring home stories of exciting crimes he solved.

Reviewers have focused Maura's father, Joe, who refused to talk about his work and in fact didn't talk much at all. However, linguist Deborah Tannen has written about the differences in male and female communication styles and John Gray reminds us that men are from Mars. Men just don't want to talk about "my day at work." Like Joe Conlon, they communicate through action.

Reading between the lines, Joe was trained as a lawyer. Although he carried a gun and badge, he probably worked in offices, pushing paper rather than chasing bad guys. He might have been assigned to white collar crime. Here's a clue: he came home regularly for supper nearly every day. So there probably weren't a whole lot of exciting stories to tell.

And we should note that he didn't brush off Maura's questions with ridicule: he just changed the subject. Once he even shared a "trick" of looking out the rear view mirror, probably acquired from another agent who was more active in actual criminal pursuit.

Joe took his kids out to play baseball on Saturday afternoons (another clue: bad guys don't work nine to five weekdays). He even built a ball field. He did chores around the house, apparently without complaint, everything from changing diapers to folding laundry and mowing lawns.

Most significantly, he didn't withdraw when his last child, Joey, was born with Down's syndrome. Joe not only remained a caring father, but also raised significant funds for a group home for other developmentally disabled children.

Maura's mother, a former beauty queen, never seems too tired or impatient to spend time with her five children. She's creative and playful, sensitive to Maura's need to attend public school rather than continue to an all-girls Catholic high school.

However, the mother's ideas seem more progressive than her cooking. The family dinner table seems more fifties than sixties. I have to admit I admired the way they managed to stay slim and healthy while eating endless servings of processed, high-carbohydrate food.

And the children seem remarkably unselfish, as they pitch in to care for Joey resisting stares and embarrassment. This family learned the joy of living with a developmentally disabled child in a time, place and social environment where those attitudes were hardly commonplace.

Even the nuns are remarkably benevolent; one fussy teacher who complains about Maura's E's in handwriting class, but she melts as she learns more about Maura.

Because the book focuses so intently on family, it's hard to get a sense of the role of friends in Maura's early life. She mentions being neglected by the popular girls but we don't get episodes of real meanness or of the close friendships young girls typically develop.

Now comes the challenge: How does Maura Conlon-McIver keep the pages turning while describing a happy childhood? She's not sticky or sentimental. She tells the story with crisp sentences, studded with original metaphors. Most importantly, Conlon-McIvor paces the story as if she were writing a novel, no easy task when writing a memoir.

Toward the end, she reports a tragedy that scars what should have been a happy climax to her grade school years. And she ends on a bittersweet note, growing aware of her talents but also her family's unspoken conflicts.

I once heard a psychologist speak about families on the basis of real research rather than myths. He claimed that families held together based on what they didn't say, rather than on openness. Perhaps it is the unrealistic expectation of free-flowing communication that harms families, rather than the actual silence. And maybe the Conlon household wasn't perfect, but I bet a lot of people would have gladly traded places with any member of that family.








Rating:
Summary: touching and unforgettable
Review: I found FBI Girl to be both touching and unforgettable. Conlon-McIvor's adeptness at describing the details of her youth will resonate with anyone who grew up in "suburbia" in the '60's and '70's. I felt like I was at the dinner table, in the FBI car and in the classroom along with young Maura as she navigated her way through her quiet childhood. Her book reminds us that sometimes the quietest amongst us have the most to say. How lucky for us that she found her "voice" and shares it with us through this loving memoir to her family. This story will stay with you for a long time.

Rating:
Summary: Suzanne Klingler
Review: I loved this book! Conlon-McIvor has a great writing style. The book is funny and alive with great quirky stories of family, her catholic upbringing and a wild imagination as a child of an FBI agent. I flew through this book and you will too. 5 stars.

Rating:
Summary: Heartwarming coming of age story
Review: I loved this book-- Ms. Conlon-McIvor has the ability to usher you into her world as a young, wide-eyed and watchful girl with a big imagination who grows into a young woman before the book is finished. This is a tender homage to her silent father and extended family, her Catholic upbringing, and her suburban Southern California neighborhood that may have appeared bland to others, but was a hot bed of intrugue to young Maura.

Rating:
Summary: Girls in unifom
Review: This books will change the way you think! Find it!
(...) I read this on my breaks and it makes me feel great about what I'm doing!

I like COP CHICKS



Rating:
Summary: Just not what I expected
Review: With a title and subtitle like this, I was expecting something completely different. It is not about the FBI - the title is just the author's "code" for her efforts to puzzle out what was going on in her family during her childhood, and especially what her uncommunicative father thought and felt. She chose this title because he happened to be an FBI Agent. If you enjoy reading about family dynamics and psychology you may like this book a lot more than I did.