Little Crazy Children are Jangling the Keys of the Kingdom

This is a book written from inside a wound, and its strongest quality is that the wound is on the page. Sinay does not report on estrangement from a safe clinical distance. He tells you what it did to his nights: the bad dreams in which he begs his son for forgiveness and is refused, the year or two of reading in his office until he was tired enough to sleep, the moment a lawyer told him he was estranged from his son and "it washed over me like the blood drains from one's body, and one can hardly stand up." His account of shame is the most specific writing in the book. He cannot answer when someone asks how old his grandchildren are, and he cannot tell friends how his kids are doing because he doesn't know.

The poem "Cause of Death: Broken Heart," with its doctors unable to find a medical reason a healthy man has died, is plain, unadorned and affecting. So is the closing email to his daughter-in-law, which asks for nothing and is therefore harder to read than any plea. For an estranged parent who has told no one, these pages offer the thing the preface promises: the news that they are not alone.

The hook is also well chosen. The title borrows John Proctor's line from The Crucible and sets estrangement beside the Salem witch hunts, giving the book a memorable frame. It addresses a topic with a large, underserved readership, and a clear place on the shelf beside Joshua Coleman's work, which Sinay engages throughout. This is a first-person account of loss, not a clinical guide, and as testimony it earns real recognition.