Snake Music is a coming-of-age story set in the 1940s and 1950s in an inner-city Catholic neighborhood of Detroit, Michigan. The author, J. Patrick Reilly, describes his struggles to cope with his mother's near-fatal descent into mental illness, his father's alcoholism and early death, his family's desperate financial straits, and a devastating accident that crippled him for several years. In the midst of these challenges, Snake Music shows the redeeming power of a loving mother, good humor, and a love for music. Reilly reveals an old and terrible family secret and its multigenerational consequences, while telling his own story through the eyes of the boy he was at each stage of his memoir. Snake Music makes the reader laugh out loud, and sometimes cry.