The Responsible Party

by Claire Carusillo

Geek Love meets Sam Lipsyte in this rollicking, hilarious debut novel about a family of unforgettable women obsessed with securing their legacy.

Claire grew up with the legend of the Unsinkable Mounsey Women. Fanny, her great-great-grandmother, made headlines in 1915 for washing ashore in England nearly a year after her ship sank. Fanny’s daughter Sarah went to collect her mother on a British ocean liner named the Lusitania—whose sinking she, too, survived. Their improbable survivals led them to success on the vaudeville circuit and as Midwestern icons. But Claire never knew the full story—until now.

Listless, jobless and recently canceled for extolling dangerous skincare advice online that sent a reader to the hospital, Claire is surprised when a knock at the door turns out to be the police, looking for answers about a 1970s cold case they suspect her mother, Kath, may know something about. As the cops zero in, Claire demands answers from her mother.

Kath’s comically long response, which blossoms into the story of the Mounseys and their descendants writ large, moves from a Liverpudlian poorhouse at the onset of World War I to a Lake Michigan lighthouse in 1971 (when “sex was freer and McDonald’s fried their potatoes with beef tallow”) to present-day Chicagoland, and along the way, offers Claire a richer understanding of everything she shares with the complicated, resilient women she descends from.

Replete with inappropriately old boyfriends, dubious medical professionals, and more than a few boats, The Responsible Party is the story of several women, in several different timelines, trying to stay afloat.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Mystery, Humor, Audiobook, Contemporary, Historical

336 pages, Hardcover

First published August 11, 2026

About the author

Claire Carusillo is a writer from Illinois. She now lives in Midway, Utah, where she co-owns Storyboard, a bookstore, skate shop, and coffee bar. She has an MFA in fiction from Columbia University, where she was a teaching fellow. Her writing has appeared all over the internet, including in Gawker, New York, Elle, and her newsletter, That Wet Look. Her debut novel, The Responsible Party, was published in 2026.

Reviews

[Amanda Schlenker]

I won this book as part of a giveaway.

The writing style of this did not click with me at all. I made it about 30 pages in. I think it may be an attempt at stream of consciousness but it skips around so much it was annoying. I also didn’t care much for the main character.

The premise seemed intriguing which is why I entered but I am just not the target audience for this writing style.

[Bam cooks the books · Rating 3.25 out of 5]

Who indeed is the responsible party? Thirty-one-year-old Claire Carusillo is back to living with her parents in the Chicago area after a skin-care product she promoted online has put a young woman in the hospital on life support. A police detective and a genetic expert named Goldie come knocking on their door. It seems the dried-up creek bed nearby has revealed a skeleton from the early 70s with a strand of hair in its mouth with enough DNA attached to lead them to Claire's family. Claire was dumb enough to do one of those online spit tests.

The rest of the novel is Claire learning her family history--five generations of maternal craziness--from her mother, Kath. It is told with great sardonic humor. I don't know if I can honestly recommend this book: it certainly won't be for everyone as it wasn't really for me but I'll give it another 1/4 star for the author's inventiveness. Five generations of unsinkable women deserve that.

[Brittany · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m honestly not quite sure what I just read, but I definitely had a time reading it. 😂 This book mentions McDonald’s a lot…

The Responsible Party is weird, messy, dramatic, and completely all over the place…in a way that somehow kept me turning the pages. There’s a decades-old murder, family secrets, questionable decisions, shipwreck survivors, generational trauma, and just an absurd amount of dysfunction packed into this story.

Claire is dealing with the fallout from some questionable skincare advice when the police show up asking questions about a murder connected to her family. Enter her mother, Kath, who has A LOT to say, and suddenly we’re bouncing through generations of Mounsey women and uncovering one wild family history.

The storytelling took some getting used to, and there were definitely moments where I had to stop and think, Wait…what is happening right now? But underneath all the chaos and drama, there were some genuinely funny moments that caught me off guard. Kath ended up being the character I was most interested in, and the relationship between her and Claire was complicated, ridiculous, and surprisingly entertaining.

This book is definitely not going to be for everyone. It rambles, jumps around, and is honestly just plain strange at times. But if you’re in the mood for a wildly dysfunctional family saga full of secrets, drama, and humor, you might find yourself having fun with this one too. 3.5 ⭐️ rounded to 4⭐️

[Anne-Sophie]

I received the book as a ARC.
I read 30% of the book and gave up. If asked, I would not be able to explain what I have read. I felt like I was thrown in the middle of the story with characters I should know. The rythme felt rushed.

[C · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was first interested in this book as it was comped to Katherine Dunn's 'Geek Love' and Sam Lipsyte.  (Intrigued, I wondered if Sam Lipsyte was enough on the radar for most readers to actually get a book sold? hmm.  But then it seems Sam Lipsyte wrote a blurb so possibly this was not really compared to Sam Lipsyte? double hmm.)  This debut novel is based on the life of the author's ancestors. The main character even has the name of the author.  Some of the events are true, some elaborated.  Mostly, the women in Claire Carusillo's lineage survived more than one shipwreck (while the men did not).  In the book, Claire's great aunt, Sarah, barely survives the sinking of the Lusitania which she was only on because she had voyaged to pick up her mother that had been missing a year from a separate shipwreck.  Makes you wonder how many ships were sinking in those days... The book is told in alternating chapters of "their legacy" and "my inheritance": past and present.  Upon reading, I would say, this book would fit nicely among Claire Vaye Watkins, Julia Langbein (American Mermaid!!), Miriam Toews (mostly Fight Night), or Jessi Jezewska Stevens -- all fantastically funny ladies if you like your humor dark, dark, dark.  I'm listing some favorite authors here.  Also try Dennard Dayle for a similar difficulty/humor level.  With the spirit of a bizarro Grey Gardens and the speediness of His Girl Friday cranked up (somehow faster) for modern times.  If you are at all a fan of the short lived bizarre TV show 'Teenage Euthanasia' you will probably definitely like this book (or if you are a fan of Alissa Nutting's writing -- I can't be sure as I haven't delved into her writing yet...) At times, it's almost too absurd for its own good. Some turns of phrase need puzzling out.  Sometimes it goes a bit TOO far and there might be three confusing items in one sentence.  So I can see some readers being a bit put off by these things...  but once I got into the style I was INTO IT.  I liked the bit of challenge that it was!  Recently, some fiction has seemed too simply told when sometimes my brain craves complicated acrobatic sentences.  I think some expectations of what might be within the book might partially be the fault of the cover.  The cover screams breezy summer book, but I think this book requires more work than that.  The plot is difficult, the characters are difficult, the humor is difficult.  This seems like such a personal project for Carusillo, so much heart and thought. (How could it not be if it is based partially on the women who existed so she could exist?)  I wish I could find some of Carusillo's other writing to see if it's different from this.  I couldn't find any other fiction, so... AMAZING if this is her first published fiction.  Also, this might be a case for a novel where I am close in age to the author, so I am just the right sort of reader to really follow along with (most of) the references... or as much as I can possibly follow along, anyway!  I love books with three timelines, love multi-generational books and the inherited trauma that goes with it, I love the TOO MUCH of it all.  And I better stop or the note for this book is becoming too much...  Maybe I'm the perfect reader for this book.  This exceeded my expectations, loved it, it's a favorite book of the year for me.   

[Elizabeth Day · Rating 2 out of 5]

Many thanks to the publisher/author via NetGalley for the free copy.

What a pointless book! What unfortunate potential to be good if it hadn’t been so hopelessly boring and bad!

My complaints are many.

For one, and this is a weird one, the book is extemely gross. I think it’s supposed to be funny, but instead it just meant I could never read this while I was eating.

Sarah and Fanny might be the most uninteresting people I’ve ever read about. I was agonized at every section that was about them and their lives before Kath.

Half of this book is just meaningless rambling. Like wow make the torture stop. I don’t need to know about your trial run with acupuncture when you’re supposed to be telling me about your family’s history. (This actually happened. An unrelated three paragraph diversion and then a return to the story as if nothing happened.)

“Concision has never been a skill of mine.” Don’t worry, the multiple endless big-size paragraphs that drone on and on with offhand comments made that clear enough on their own.

It read very much as though I was supposed to be thinking it was funny. As if every line was supposed to be making me laugh out loud, and I couldn’t ignore how much it was calling itself out. HEY! THIS IS A FUNNY WRITING STYLE! Rather it read like what a tryhard middle schooler would sound like if they were an adult: definitely could be funny if they weren’t trying so gosh darn hard (especially to be edgy). Sadly, this book was funny basically never.

Parts that felt interesting or shocking were unfortunately not enough to save the book from how muddled everything else was.

(PG-13 rating)

[Cole · Rating 3 out of 5]

⭐️⭐️⭐️✨

Thank you Macmillan Audio for the #gifted copy in exchange for an honest review! #MacAudio2026

Claire comes from a line of unsinkable women. Her great-great-grandmother, Fanny, became famous after reappearing a year after her shipwreck, only for Fanny’s daughter to survive her own shipwreck. Claire never knew the whole story, until the police came knocking at her door looking for answers to a 1970s cold case that they suspect her mother, Kath, to be involved in. It’s then that Kath lets the cat out of the bag, and unveils the long history of women in their family staying afloat.

The premise of this book is amazing, and I think the execution threw me off a bit. I wasn’t expecting the stream-of-consciousness/non sequitur style. It’s not that I didn’t like it, some of those non sequiturs legitimately had me laughing out loud. I think it works really well in a TV show like 30 Rock, but harder to follow in an audiobook, and even harder to follow when you’re dealing with multiple characters and multiple timelines. That said, it was truly a wild ride. Zura Johnson kept me entertained and did a phenomenal job capturing the personalities of these women, including their quirk. Despite some of its flaws, this debut novel was genuinely hilarious and I’m excited to see where Claire Carusillo goes next.

Reviewed as part of an #ARC from #NetGalley.

Read this book if you:
🧬 have mixed feelings about Ancestry.com
🍟 knew that McDonald’s drive-thrus didn’t appear until the 1970s
🗣️ love it when your sidebars turn into sidebars

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[MC · Rating 4 out of 5]

In technical execution this is probably a 3.5 or maybe even a 3. Mostly because I felt there were some missed editorial opportunities. The whole thing about Claire’s poisoned reader totally falls to the wayside (fine, because it was def the least interesting part of the story, but does leave you with a sense of a loose thread, especially when all the descriptions take care to point it out). Cases where a character is described as saying something “again” but never said it in the first place. Metaphors that go on so long you lose track of what timeline you’re in. That sort of thing.

But I just LOVED IT so much it has to be a 4, at LEAST. It’s so weird and charming. Those metaphors that sometimes go on too long also sometimes layer far past and near past in present in this kaleidoscopic way; the layered dialogism blends all the characters in a way that is yes, confusing, but also really drives home the (un)truths of identity and grifting and storytelling in a way that I just find absolutely delicious. Plus it just feels rewarding to read something that your brain has to work at a bit— it’s fun, dramatic, and breezy, but not light easy beach reading. It’s the kind of multigenerational family saga that I love, but filled with lying freaks. It’s like an Elena Ferrante book and a Jordy Rosenberg book were buried on the beach of Lake Michigan in the 1970s and left to fester and meld together. Or maybe akin to a Joy Williams style of writing? But funny. It’s hard to describe, but it’s great. Claire was totally recognizable, Kath impressive, and Sarah/Fanny (allegedly) delightful.

I know this book will be polarizing, but for me I’m on the pro side of those poles. I wish my mom was alive to read this one with me.

[Rachel Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

Okay this is hilarious. I’ll leave it to all the Booker Prize followers and Clarice Lispector fans to dive first person into the midst of a character’s mental breakdown. I prefer a more removed level of craziness plus lots of levity.

The prose is playful and masterful, almost like a grown-up Shel Silverstein.

And although this is getting comparisons to Geek Love, it actually reminds me most of Angela Carter’s Wise Children and John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire. So if you like either of those, or tragicomic family dramas with a satirical narrator, you should try this.

[Emilyvmyers · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve loved Claire’s writing since her column in Man Repeller (which was a meh blog but Claire made me keep going back to see if she’d written another column). She is a satirist, and a trained writer, and must be read suchly. If you go into this wanting precise corporate efficiency speak à la something you can easily buy in an airport, you will not like it. I LOVED it because I knew it would be weird and funny and include a lot of side notes and rabbit holes and florid writing. 17/10 highly recommend and will be gifting (friends beware).

[Lauren (sharonoldsfanclub) · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a wacky, strange novel this was. It’s like if a Wes Anderson film had a baby with a Tom Robbins novel, just full of whimsy and weirdness and quirks. The story follows four generations of a family of women, from the early 1900’s to current time. This family, the Mounseys, has never heard of a normal day. There’s shipwrecks, there’s wellness scandals, there’s a dead body, there’s a suspicious collection of teeth, there’s a weirdo living at a lighthouse with a jacuzzi inside. The novel is a linguistic feast, full of laugh-out-loud lines and kooky descriptions, while also building really dynamic female characters whose relationships are complicated and fractured. No one’s a good person in this story! Which I loved. I also think the act of honest storytelling is portrayed in a fun way here. Our youngest character (in her 30’s), Claire, is providing to the reader the story that her mother, Kath, is telling her about Kath’s childhood, with Claire occasionally interjecting to remind the reader that Kath isn’t to be trusted or she knows that a specific part of the story is false. Just a fun commentary on the biases of narration. I do wish we could have had a bit more of Claire’s current life story added in. She’s a real shithead and has quirks and bugaboos aplenty, and I wanted more about her life in the moment. (Thank you to Henry Holt for the arc)

[Kate | Date With A Thriller · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 ⭐️s rounded to 4 ⭐️s

What the hell did I just read? 😅 At times confusing, all over the place (I sound like I’m describing my brain right now 🤣), mysterious, and humorous, I actually enjoyed this one! Just don’t ask me exactly what this is about! 😂

Thank you partner Henry Holt for the gifted ARC in exchange for my honest review! ❤️

[Leila · Rating 3.5 out of 5]

Very fun satire, I'm surprised this book isn't being talked about more. Thank you to Henry Holt and Co. for the Advance Reader's Copy.

Claire, our narrator, is living with her parents after being publicly shamed online for selling some kind of snake-oil adjacent skincare serum that (surprise!) contained some questionable ingredients. One day, the police shows up at their house: a long-dead body has been found, and they need Claire or her mother's DNA because it might match a hair sample found on the corpse. Somehow, her mom, Kath, knows more than she's letting on. So she starts telling Claire her story, as well as the stories of her great-grandmother Fanny and her great-aunt Sarah, who both survived the sinking of two different ships. The women in this story are not only resilient but entrepreneurial down to their bones. They are grifters, scammers, and legitimate shady business-owners. Though they are prickly and not always very nice, you get attached to their ridiculous antics almost immediately. In three storylines spanning a century, we get to witness how these women survive, all the while being their adventurous, extravagant, and eccentric selves. I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a rip-roaring fun time!

[Robin Carson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very kooky joyride

[Nell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Claire Carusillo the writer, the woman, the genius that you are !

This book is a singular voice, rare, full of heart and humor. You'll laugh, you'll cry, and never look at lighthouses or jet-skis the same.

[Mariel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is such a bonkers ride. An implausible Russian doll of a novel that I simply could not look away from, and have no choice but to marvel at the amount of layers present. Unhinged and oddly touching.

[Hannah Kolodner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Claire is masterfully witty and her exacting language reflects the horrors in a way that has me chortle-cringing. This is one of those books you have to read every single word to appreciate the layers of meaning, but I was still absolutely missing things. I am sincerely stupider than this book, which I love for me. Go, Claire!

[E · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite books I’ve read in a long, long while!!! Had me cackling with laughter and staying up too late so I could keep reading with twists that left me genuinely shocked. Carusillo’s voice is as unsinkable as her characters. No one, truly, could have written a funnier, weirder book than her.

[Douglas Perry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Claire Carusillo wants you to laugh.

Almost every paragraph in her debut novel, “The Responsible Party,” is mined with whoopie cushions, whether it’s an oddball description or an out-of-left-field one-liner.

One of the story’s heroines, Sarah Mounsey, has an accent that “was mid-Atlantic like a Sharpie-browed talkie siren’s.” Decades earlier, her mother Fanny headed to her doom – aboard the RMS Empress of Ireland, which went down off Canada – “feeling like 31,270 dollars, which is about equivalent to a million bucks today.”

The novel launches with that 1914 shipwreck, followed by the better-known disaster that befell the RMS Lusitania, but don’t worry, Carusillo won’t let the epic tragedies get to you. She writes that a U-boat torpedoed the Lusitania during World War I because the German government had warned British and American civilian ships to stay out of the war zone – or possibly because of “a foreign competitor’s plot to kneecap a Hershey’s syrup smuggling ring operating out of the ship’s cargo hold.”

Such jokes are sure to provoke groans from readers – and, now and again, to cause them confusion. (Carusillo, for both good and ill, has a thing for inventing silly crime outfits – “a gang of pin-curled guttersnipes busted in a neckerchief scalping ring” comes later. She mentions them in passing for no reason at all and then never brings them up again.)

This relentless determination to get you to laugh is endearing – and also a shame, because Carusillo has a story to tell, and she knows how to bring her characters alive. At times, she offers up relatable insight into the human condition, writing that Sarah, soaking in the tub after learning of the Empress of Ireland’s fate, is left “too grievous to masturbate.” The author notes that “the saddest expanses of life are the least interesting to relay, clogged with hair in the drain and incomplete paperwork.”

Carusillo doesn’t trust herself to linger on these moments. She’s much more comfortable with please-like-me razzmatazz.

If you can compartmentalize the jesting, the narrative is compelling. In the present day, a decades-old “bog body” is found in a creek near the family home of a 31-year-old freelance writer named Claire. Through DNA, police determine that a tuft of hair wrapped around the corpse’s tongue belongs to someone related to said freelance scribe. This leads Claire to pull family stories out of her prickly, hard-driving mother, Kath, sending us decades back in time.

The author, in case you’re wondering, narrates the novel as herself.

Would you believe this fictional story is based on true events from the Carusillo family? OK, well, some of the events are true.

On her popular Substack, called That Wet Look, Carusillo has described the novel as “disrespectful historical fiction” and said that two of its key characters – Fanny and Fanny’s daughter Sarah – are “my IRL great-great aunt and great-great-grandmother.”

Carusillo’s great-great aunt and great-great-grandmother indisputably led fascinating lives. Fanny Mounsey did indeed go down with the Empress of Ireland in 1914. She was presumed dead, but then a woman some people believed to be Fanny popped up in Liverpool a year later, very much alive but spouting gibberish. Fanny’s daughter Sarah boarded the Lusitania to retrieve the woman – in real life and in the novel. That ship went down as well, of course, and Sarah actually survived.

In the novel, the fictional Fanny and Sarah eventually make it back to their home in Chicago and become known on the regional vaudeville circuit as the Unsinkable Mounseys – local celebrities, to be sure, though not “accomplished enough to be inducted into the pantheon of Illinois folk heroes like Mary Todd, Casimir Pulaski or the Obama daughter who smokes cigs,” Carusillo writes.

Har-har. And, for the record, the tabloids have caught both of the Obama daughters smoking.

[lisa · Rating 1 out of 5]

I struggled to get through this book and I can't put my finger on why. After almost 6 weeks of reading this I don't have strong opinions on it one way or the other. It wasn't badly written. It had an interesting premise. The characters were intriguing. However, I didn't like it, and had to force myself to finish it. If I hadn't gotten it from Library Thing in exchange for a review I wouldn't have.

The only thing I can come up with is that the choice of narration didn't work for me, and the characters didn't have anything to make me interested in them. This is a story of generations of plain white women who are desperate to make themselves stand out from the pack of other plain white women. They do vaguely interesting things, the sort of thing that might pop up on a random social media feed about some forgotten woman of history you've never heard of. But despite these vaguely interesting things they are ultimately boring, and their accomplishments aren't as interesting as they seem to think. The one exception might be Kath, and I think that's because the story is mostly told through her point of view, as filtered through her youngest daughter's narration. Kath is telling her daughter Claire (Carusillo, the main character is the author, get it?) about the history of their family. Claire's great-great-grandmother Fanny survived the sinking of the Titanic. Her great-aunt Sarah survived the sinking of the Lusitania. Her grandmother left her mother with these two women to finish raising her. And her mother has just been tracked down by the local police because Claire has uploaded her own DNA profile on a website that links her to a dead body that has been recently found. And to find out how we got here Kath has to tell Claire the most convoluted story of all time, the story of her teenage recklessness and Fanny and Sarah's old lady recklessness. 

And that story drags and drags. Sometimes we are getting Kath's voice. Sometimes we are getting Claire's commentary as she relays Kath's voice. Sometimes we are only getting Claire's commentary. At some point it's mentioned that Claire is the youngest in her family and that made me better understand her whining and neediness. (And why, as an only child, Kath seems a little disgusted by her own daughter.) Sometimes pieces of the story seem to make sense. Other times there are so many questions that you realize the story doesn't make any sense. Sometimes you get a sense that Claire is aware of these inconsistencies and is frustrated by them. Sometimes you can tell that she is either ignoring or hasn't noticed some glaring error. The book is only told through unreliable narrators, and maybe that's what makes it hard to read. 

There are glimmers of something interesting, particularly the mention of Jeanne Calment, the oldest woman in France ("oldest" in quotes obviously) but they are barely explored. The ending is a disappointment, but I was prepared for this since the entire book was so dull. Like I stated earlier, these women just aren't as interesting as they think they are. 

[Indra · Rating 3 out of 5]

📚✨ The Responsible Party by Claire Carusillo

Thank you to Henry Holt for the ARC! 💛

⭐️⭐️⭐️✨ 3.5 stars

This book is weird. It’s messy. It’s chaotic. It’s occasionally hilarious. And honestly? I’m still not entirely sure what I think about it. 😂

The Responsible Party follows multiple generations of the unforgettable Mounsey women, beginning with a woman who somehow survives a shipwreck, washes ashore months later, and kicks off a family legacy built on resilience, survival, questionable choices, and absolute chaos.

The premise immediately grabbed me. A family history full of shipwrecks, vaudeville performers, scandals, cold cases, and larger-than-life women sounded like exactly my kind of book. And there is definitely a lot to love here.

The writing is incredibly sharp and often laugh-out-loud funny. Claire Carusillo has a unique voice, and there were plenty of moments where I highlighted passages simply because they were so clever. The family history itself was fascinating, especially the stories of Fanny and Sarah, who completely stole the show for me.

That said, this is not an easy read.

The narrative jumps around constantly between timelines, characters, and generations. More than once I found myself flipping back to remember who someone was or how they connected to the rest of the family. The family tree at the beginning definitely became my friend. 😅

I also think this is going to be a very polarizing book. The writing style leans heavily into long tangents, rambling observations, and pseudo-intellectual humor. Sometimes it worked brilliantly. Other times I felt like I was fighting my way through paragraphs trying to figure out what was actually happening.

Claire herself is not always the easiest character to like, but she is oddly compelling. The women in this family are flawed, messy, desperate, and often make terrible decisions, which somehow made them feel very human.

✨ What I loved:
🚢 The wild multi-generational family saga
🚢 Sharp, clever humor
🚢 Fanny and Sarah's incredible story
🚢 Messy, morally gray women
🚢 Family secrets and historical intrigue

✨ What didn't work as well for me:
⚠️ Confusing timelines and character connections
⚠️ Some sections felt much longer than necessary
⚠️ The writing style occasionally became overwhelming
⚠️ It took a while to fully find its footing

Overall, The Responsible Party is an ambitious, unusual debut packed with family drama, historical mystery, dark humor, and unforgettable women trying to survive impossible circumstances. It wasn't always an easy read, but it was certainly a memorable one.

If you enjoy messy family sagas, complicated women, and stories that embrace chaos, this might be exactly your thing. 🚢🌊📖

[SVL · Rating 3 out of 5]

This debut novel and advanced readers copy I got access to follows the follies of multiple generations of women as they try to secure their historic, waterlogged legacy. While the writing was super sharp and laugh out loud funny at times, this novel is quite long and the characters are confused easily. The similarity to Geek Love as advertised in the blurb got me interested but the similarity starts and ends at the family’s early run as a freak show circus act of sort after they survive not one, but two shipwrecks. All that to be said, this is a creative concept from a sharp new writer.

The story begins with Fanny, the matriarch of this lineage of crazy women. On a trip to visit European ancestors, Fanny’s boat sinks and she washes ashore months later and is placed in an insane asylum, forcing her youngest daughter to sail across the ocean and get her. Her daughter Sarah suffers a similar fate, her boat also capsizing, yet like her mother she manages to survive and bring her mother home, at which point the pair start a traveling carnival act together to profit off their incredible luck.

Fast forward a couple generations and Claire is Fanny’s great great granddaughter and when the cops come knocking asking her and her mother Kath to submit spit to solve a cold case from decades ago, Claire discovers she never really got the full story from her mother. The novel then jumps between current day Claire reacting to Kath’s story, and Kath’s POV as the entire history of the Mounsey women unfolds.

As previously mentioned, the writing is sharp and funny, though character names further confuse the plot and the character diagram at the front of the book should be more clear and easily understandable. I didn’t love how the ending was specifically written but the story ending was somewhat satisfying. Claire and Kath as characters inhibit a problematic grey area of modern discourse with their harmful inventions and ill researched online reviews, which make for a funny POV as the history of the family is unraveled. I did want a bit more clarity on exactly who was rescued from the almshouse but I think I get it now.

Overall I think this author has a bright future ahead and I’m looking forward to their next novel despite this one feeling like a real slog. Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced readers copy in exchange for an honest review. This novel publishes on 8/11/26.

[Kimberly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Claire Carusillo’s The Responsible Party joined me after dinner with a cup of coffee, and within a few chapters I realized I had absolutely no idea where this family was taking me. 😂 Do you ever read a book that makes you think, “What on earth is happening?” while you keep turning the pages anyway? Thank you to Henry Holt and Co. for the gifted copy.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

This book is WEIRD, friends. Weird, messy, smart, darkly funny, and completely unlike what I normally pick up.

Claire is 31, jobless, and dealing with the fallout from some very questionable skincare advice she gave online when the police arrive asking about a decades-old murder. Apparently DNA has connected Claire’s family to the case, and her mother Kath may know more than she’s been telling.

And Kath has A LOT to tell.

What follows is this wildly tangled trip through generations of Mounsey women, beginning with Fanny and Sarah—two women whose family legend includes surviving separate shipwrecks and eventually turning their “Unsinkable Mounseys” story into a vaudeville act. From there we bounce through family secrets, teenage rebellion, a lighthouse, terrible boyfriends, questionable decisions, and one very strange cold case.

I’ll admit the beginning took some work for me. The storytelling rambles, jumps around, and occasionally had me rereading a paragraph because I’d lost the thread somewhere along the way. But once I settled into Carusillo’s very particular sense of humor, I started having fun with it.

Kath ended up being the character I wanted more and more from. Her relationship with Claire is complicated, sometimes ridiculous, and surprisingly tender underneath all that dysfunction. And Fanny and Sarah? Those women had STORIES. 🚢

This won’t be everyone’s cup of coffee, and I completely understand why. But sometimes it’s fun to read something that refuses to behave like every other book on your shelf.

[Shradha · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75 stars rounded to 4

"The Responsible Party" is a book that is hard to pinpoint. Part murder mystery, part generational saga, and part family dramedy, the story can be called everything except boring. If I had to liken this to anything, I would say this book is part "Remarkably Bright Creatures" (minus the octopus) and part "Holes."

Claire is an unlikeable audience surrogate, but one that is sympathetic in how pathetic she is. The real star of the show is Kath and her ancestors Fanny and Sarah Mounsey, who also do despicable and desperate things in the name of survival. I found myself reading past my daily goal just to find out how deep the rabbit hole of family secrets in the name of "preserving one's legacy" went.

There are plenty of triggers present in this book for sexual assault and grooming behaviors. Nothing is excused or treated with rose tinted glasses, but for those who dislike books addressing these topics, beware.

My biggest criticism of this book would also have to be what I perceived to be its strength: its reliance on pseudo-intellectualism to highlight the inefficacies, hypocrisies, and humanity of our main characters with humor and circumlocutory ramblings. It made for some lengthy paragraphs that I often had to go back, look up, and re-read to understand what was going on. I could see many readers being turned off by this and giving up before the book really hits its stride.

Overall, if you like messy characters, varied vocabulary, and historical/family intrigue, then you can't go wrong with "The Responsible Party."

Thanks to LibraryThing for allowing me to read a free copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I want to thank @henryholtbooks & @macmillan.audio for providing 𝑻𝑯𝑬 𝑹𝑬𝑺𝑷𝑶𝑵𝑺𝑰𝑩𝑳𝑬 𝑷𝑨𝑹𝑻𝒀 𝒃𝒚 𝑪𝒍𝒂𝒊𝒓𝒆 𝑪𝒂𝒓𝒖𝒔𝒊𝒍𝒍𝒐 𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒅 𝒃𝒚 𝒁𝒖𝒓𝒂 𝑱𝒐𝒉𝒏𝒔𝒐𝒏, out 8/11.

This was a wild ride of family drama, historical fiction, murder mystery, and comedy all wrapped up in a mother-daughter storytelling journey.

This was another story that had so much going on from the first pages, that trying to multitask was impossible. My entire brain was needed to hold on to the threads of this bonkers story of family lore told by Kath, Claire's mother, when the police come asking about a murder from the 1970's.

I did feel a bit of empathy here for my husband when he asks me a simple question and I feel the need to share the full context of an answer. A trying situation for an ADHD-er, but I have to say, I felt the slight pain of getting lost in the weeds.

Fortunately, the weeds of this story were quite funny and quirky, and it kept me turning the pages to see what this family history had to do with a murder. It did come around, and with such a feeling of delight I was glad I gave it my all.

Johnson gave an admirable performance reading this novel with all the riotous dysfunction, embodying Claire's dismay and Kath's steady nonchalance.

This is a great tale for all the readers who are looking for something fresh that they can really sink into with clever and witty writing, dark humor, and a willingness to embrace the slightly absurd. I am quite curious to see where this debut author goes next, even if I get lost trying to follow!
3.5 stars

[Pranav Bhatnagar · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Responsible Party is one of those books that made me laugh at moments when I really should not have been laughing. I went in expecting a story about a strange family history and a cold case, but what I got was something much more unusual. Claire is pulled into an investigation after police discover an unidentified body with a strand of hair tied around its tongue, and her DNA may connect the body to her family. From there, the story moves between Claire’s present and the bizarre history of the women who came before her. Fanny and Sarah’s story kept surprising me because every time I thought I understood what had happened, the book found another way to make it stranger. The family itself is fascinating, but Claire’s relationship with her mother Kath was what really stayed with me. They argue, judge each other, misunderstand each other, and still clearly care more than either one wants to admit. I also loved how the book uses humor to talk about some very dark things. The jokes can be completely ridiculous one moment and then suddenly reveal something sad underneath them. That balance should not work as well as it does, but somehow it does. By the final pages, I realised I had become much more invested in Claire and Kath than I expected. Their whole story starts feeling less like a mystery that needs solving and more like a family trying to understand what it inherited from the women who came before. I finished this with a strange mixture of laughter, sadness, and the feeling that I had just read something I could not easily compare to anything else.

[Kathleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

In The Responsible Party by author Claire Carusillo, the reader follows the story of a family of women who keep their legacy of surviving events alive throughout the decades.

I really have a hard time figuring out what I want to say about this book. What could have been a really intriguing story was anything but that because of the way the story meanders and jumps all over the place, it was also supposed to be humorous, but I found that the author's dry humor wasn't all that funny.

Told in the first-person narrative, the reader follows along as Claire narrates the story of her family of unforgettable women who are obsessed with securing their legacy as the Unsinkable Mounsey Women, even if they have to commit murder to do so.

The story is broken down in the past / present timeline in five parts: their legacy (great-great-grandmother Fanny and great-aunt Sarah) and her inheritance (Claire and her mother Kath). Fanny and Sarah's story is that both survive being on ships that sink and later become The Unsinkable Mounsey Women, vaudeville entertainers throughout the Midwest. Through Kath's telling of her childhood living with Fanny and Sarah, Claire describes how the legacy to maintain the family legacy leads to a murder that resurfaces many years later when a detective and genetic genealogist come to their home with questions about a body that was recovered with DNA from their family.

The story is just too weird to enjoy, and as I continued to read it, I got to the point that I was saying, "WTF am I reading?" What was supposed to be a historical novel, was filled with historical events that weren't even relevant to the story, and the only redeeming portion of the story was that the murder was somewhat interesting. Unfortunately, the story meandered so much that I even considered DNFing it, but I always give a story the chance to hopefully turn into something entertaining much to my chagrin.

Disclaimer: I received an ARC from NetGalley and a paperback ARC from the publisher in exchange for my honest review.

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[BooksInBloom19 · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75⭐️
The Responsible Party by Claire Carusillo is a debut novel loosely based on family lore, and it's wildly different from my usual reads. Don't let the rambling monologue style fool you in the beginning (I almost DNF'd like others mentioned). Stick with it, because the more you read, the funnier it gets.
The colorful language is absolutely fantastic and refreshingly unfiltered. Carusillo doesn't hold back with the profanity-laden dialogue, and it adds so much character to the story. I found myself laughing out loud constantly as I got deeper into the pages.
What really makes this book shine is Kath and Claire's mother-daughter relationship. It's unlike any I've encountered, but somehow it just works perfectly within this chaotic, colorful world. The backstory involving Fanny and Sarah adds fascinating layers, their story is what shaped Kath into who she is, and Kath's own wild teen experiences just add to the beautiful mess of it all.
I'd definitely recommend this to anyone looking to step completely outside their normal wheelhouse. Give it a fair chance past those first few chapters, and you'll discover a genuinely fun, engaging read that'll surprise you in the best possible way.
Thank you to the publisher/author for providing me with an advanced complimentary copy. All thoughts shared here are my own.

[Samantha · Rating 2 out of 5]

As always, the dangers of writing a novel based on one’s ancestors is that family stories are rarely as interesting to the general reading public as they are to, y’know, one’s own family.

This is a nice piece of writing in parts and that helped a lot with the attempt to take a family story and turn it into something others would care about. But the ancestral bits of this are also the weakest parts of the book, which makes the whole premise feel rather thin.

The Unsinkable Mounsey business didn’t work at all (making a joke about Molly Brown didn’t make it seem like less of a rip-off of her story), and Sarah and Fanny (who are supposed to be the foundation of the book) aren’t likable or interesting and their portion of the narrative was unfocused and meandering. Narrator Claire also brings little to the table.

It’s Kath who feels worthy of our attention, and the fact that much of the book is focused on her story saves this from being a tough book to enjoy. That said, it can’t save the overarching plot from feeling confused and forced, and while the humor is good in parts, it often disappears at the points where the story needs it the most.

*I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.*

[Sandi Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thankyou to #GoodreadsGiveaway for the opportunity to read this ARC.
Narrated by Claire Carusillo a 31 year old skin care influencer as the story begins in 1914 with Claire’s great great grandmother Fanny Mounsey going down with the RMS Empress of Ireland off the coast of Quebec. She was presumed dead along with nearly 1,000 other passengers bound for England. Eleven months later Fanny is found in Liverpool as she had been placed in an insane asylum forcing her youngest daughter Sarah to sail across the ocean and brings Fanny home to their Chicago suburb.

In the present, Claire and her mother, Kath, are visited by a police officer and a “genetic genealogist” who have questions about a body which was found in the nearby woods with a strand of hair around his tongue. He had been murdered in the 1970s. By using genealogy websites DNA suggests the hair’s owner is related to Claire who set up a public DNA profile. Until now, Claire has never known the full story of the Mounseys and now Kath must go back in time to shed light on Fanny’s fate and the family’s connection to the dead body.