A new memoir turns surviving Cleveland childhood into a triumph of spirit.

Chicago Tribune

01-08-2025

What do a deathbed, a dentist's drill and a bottle of Olde English furniture polish have in common? According to author C. A. Sadlowski, everything. In her latest book, 'The Hanging Branch Club: A Cleveland Time Capsule,' Sadlowski digs deep into the cluttered attic of mid-20th-century memory, dusts off the ridiculous and makes it radiantly relatable.
Part memoir, part confession and all heart, 'The Hanging Branch Club' unspools the early life of a tall, smart-mouthed Polish Catholic girl growing up in a neighborhood where the rules were unspoken but ironclad. Unless, of course, you wrote them down yourself — which Hope Sarnecki did and thus was born the Hanging Branch Club, a survival pact for her and her siblings to navigate their formidable mother, an ever-changing cast of oddball relatives and the challenges of growing up with too few bras and too many confessions.
'It's my love letter to an unfiltered Cleveland,' Sadlowski explains. 'To the women who ruled with wooden spoons, the back porches where secrets were spilled and the kids who made sense of it all by making up clubs, songs and clever exits.'
From ducking the wrath of a mother wielding a broom to inventing saintlike patience at piano lessons with Miss Birch, Sadlowski's Hope is the kind of narrator who finds wisdom in the weeds of her grandmother's garden and rebellion in the back seat of a blue Ford coupe. And just when you're laughing, she lands a moment so poignant you'll stop to underline it.
'I laughed out loud. Then I cried. Then I called my mom,' said one early reader. 'This book brought it all back — the smells, the fears, the family code of silence — and made me fall in love with childhood all over again.'
Whether you were raised Polish Catholic or not, if you've ever tried to dodge your mom's mood swings, faced off with a school nun or thought about throwing a sibling under the bus to survive, 'The Hanging Branch Club' is for you.