There are convoluted family trees, and then there are those like Willie Upton's in Lauren Groff's The Monsters of Templeton. Hers is such a tangle that it's more of a closed loop. Willie embarks on a quest to discover the identity of her father with the fact that he descended from an unknown branch of her family tree as her only clue. Willie has just returned to her hometown of Templeton, a fictionalized Cooperstown, NY, just as a huge (dead) creature, hundreds of years old, has been removed from Lake Glimmerglass. The monsters in the title refer both to this creature and its possible progeny, as well as Willie's forbears, who have murdered, committed suicide, been murdered, and have harbored any number of other family secrets. Willie is recovering from a disastrous affair that concluded with her trying to run down her lover's wife in an airplane. Helping her cope is her hippie-mother-turned-nurse-turned-born-again-Christian, Vivienne, who sees the family research as a means of getting Willie's life back on track. There is also a benevolent ghost who helps Willie solve the riddle of her parentage, but I never grasped which of Willie's unsavory or victimized relatives had haunted the family cottage for generations. As in many such dual-storyline books, the ancient history is more captivating than Willie's moping and whining. One of my favorite episodes, though, is where a young Willie is reprimanded by her mother and the principal for punching a boy at school. When the boy confesses that he called her a bastard, the fatherless girl's transgression is quickly forgiven in the midst of embarrassed stammering on the part of the adults.
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