Nine Years Under: Coming of Age in an Inner-City Funeral Home

To be honest, I read this book because its set in Baltimore and I still have a soft spot for Charm City.

When Sheri Booker was 15, her great-aunt Mary died and, in her grief, the idea came to her to work at the funeral home that prepared Aunt Mary's body for burial. (A family friend owned the funeral home, so it's not as entirely random as the previous sentence makes it seem.) Nine Years Under is the story of her years working at the funeral home - through high school, college, and beyond - and how such work shaped her. Its well-written and does a nice job confronting the drug-and-gun culture that has ravaged so many urban neighborhoods, West Baltimore not least among them. Booker paints a realistic portrait of the people she interacts with, their flaws as well as their strengths. Nine Years Under also taught me more about the mortuary sciences than I expected to learn, from the legal aspects of inheriting such a business to the dirty work of filling in bullet holes.

That said, I found the book lacking in both depth and breadth. Occasionally, Booker delves into her life away from the funeral home, but the passages always seem incomplete and, in some cases, entire out-of-place. The book spans nine years, and while the reader is shown that her personal life can be messy, the balance between too much information and too little is off. The best bits revolve around the interaction with the families, and I wish there were more of these. Too often, pages pass with Booker paying bills and ordering coffins, key parts of her job, to be certain, but less interesting to read about than the families who cannot - or will not - agree which picture belongs on the memorial program. (Whoever pays the bill makes the final decision, Booker tells her readers, and how could it be otherwise?)

As a side note, the metro ride from my apartment to my office passed through West Baltimore, but what I remember more than the thugs, of whom there were plenty, were the occasional transvestites. I was, then, especially amused when one made an appearance at the Wylie Funeral Home.