All Souls: A Family Story From Southie

Known as Ma throughout the book, Michael’s mother is bawdy and unconventional, wears mini-skirts and high heels everywhere she goes, fistfights while pregnant, plays the accordion in local pubs, and threatens anyone who menaces her family with knives, scissors, and firearms. However, Ma is unable to protect her children from the dangerous streets of Southie. After her sons Kevin and Frankie die, she decides to take the youngest children to Colorado, to live in a camper outside the town of Golden. After Stevie’s murder conviction is overturned, Ma begins to make sense of what happened to her family in Southie.

Frankie is a Golden Gloves boxer, a hard worker, lives without alcohol or drugs for most of his life, and commands respect from everyone on the street. Frankie takes his responsibility as a role model to children seriously. He comes to be a stand-in father figure for many of the young boys in the neighborhood whose own fathers are not present. Late in the book, while taking part in a robbery—so that his brother, Kevin, who had recently escaped from a life of crime, did not have to—Frankie is shot. The men working the robbery with him kill him, instead of taking him to a hospital so that he can’t implicate them in the crime.

From the beginning of the book, Kevin is a grifter and a con man. Even as a young boy, he delights in making extra money through swindling carnival game barkers, and he runs several cons in stores and on the streets. Kevin becomes a drug dealer and grows close to the notorious Irish mob boss, Whitey Bulger. The family rarely sees him because he is out all night. Kevin eventually marries a woman and leaves the criminal life. After Frankie’s death, Kevin is caught in a jewelry heist and goes to jail, where he eventually takes his own life, hanging himself with a bedsheet.