Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is a debut novel from Patti Yumi Cottrell. Our unreliable narrator Helen Moran, ironically nick-named Sister Reliability, receives a call while waiting for her flatmate’s new Ikea sofa to be delivered to their tiny apartment. It’s her uncle telling her that her adoptive brother has died. Helen immediately decides to leave New York and head home to Milwaukee with the sole purpose of investigating his death. Estranged from her adoptive parents - she hasn’t seen them for 5 years - she arrives on their doorstep with inappropriate questions, criticisms and demands. This would all seem rather tiresome if it wasn’t for Cottrell’s ability to create a character like Helen Moran. Helen is 32, childless, lives in a tiny shared apartment, and is partially employed as a counsellor helping troubled youth. She, like her brother, who isn’t a blood relation, is Korean and her family members are always referred to as ‘adoptive’ - the adoptive parents, the adoptive brother etc. Helen Moran looks at the world through a lens that is peculiarly off-beat but also probing,  bringing truths that maybe should remain nameless to the surface. At times, being inside Helen’s head felt like a psychotic episode - the author intends you to feel uncomfortable. Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is a sharp look at what growing up Asian-American in suburbia looks like, how being an outsider - not having a sense of belonging - affects the ways in which you observe the world around, and why unhappiness leads to suicide for some and a determination to embrace life for others. While Helen is hardly likeable, her determination to make the most of what she has - while living in New York, she wrote an essay about how to survive on next to nothing in the city; she cares for troubled youth, breaking the rules of her workplace in an attempt to make meaningful connections - and her unwavering close observations of people to reveal what makes life tick are strangely admirable. When we hear Helen described as looking like a homeless person we are hardly surprised - by this stage we have been in the head of Moran for a while and watched her decide that her parents’ grief is a balding middle aged man who eats pizza; she has taken apart the bouquets of flowers and dumped them a bucket of bleach-saturated cleaning water to be helpful, she has eaten the whole special cake which is meant for mourners, she has rifled through her parents' home in her detective endeavours to make sense of her brother’s suicide. Mostly it’s her behaviour and thoughts that lead you to think she is mad. However, as you read on, the day of the funeral approaches and as relatives and friends arrive with their sentimental pat comments, you wonder who’s deranged? One of the best things about Cottrell’s writing is her ability to embed so much humour, alongside philosophical musings from our odd narrator, into a story about disorientation and dislocation. Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is blackly funny and will appeal to fans of Miriam Toews and Nell Zink. {Reviewed by STELLA}   >> Listen to Stella reviewing this book on RNZ National.