Book Review & Giveaway: Girl at the Edge

Synopsis:

Not a single resident of St. Augustine, Florida will ever forget the day that Michael Joshua Hayes walked into a local shopping mall. He walked out a mass murderer. Eleven people died that day, including Michael’s wife.

He’s spent over a decade on death row. His daughter, Evelyn, doesn’t remember a time when her father wasn’t an infamous killer.

Evelyn is determined to unravel the mystery behind her father’s actions and understand what drove him to shoot those innocent victims. Her search leads her to a support group for children of incarcerated parents. She forms an intense friendship with Clarisse, a young woman in the group, who is also the child of a murderer. The girls quickly become inseparable, sharing their secrets and fears.

As summer begins, Evelyn is poised at the edge of her future and struggling with a life-defining choice: whether to believe that a parent’s legacy of violence is escapable . . . or that history will keep repeating itself regardless of what we choose.

Review:

Girl at the Edge is the debut novel from Karen Dietrich, author of The Girl Factory: A Memoir and several volumes of poetry. Dietrich holds an Master of Fine Arts degree in poetry, and has taught at the high school and college levels. In addition to writing, she serves as a drummer in an indie rock band.

“My father is a murderer.” So begins Girl at the Edge, a compelling and deeply disturbing consideration of the invisible victims of horrendous crime: the perpetrator’s family. Evelyn’s father had an extramarital relationship with her mother, Mira, and when his wife learned of the affair and left him, he took up residence with Mira. Six months before Evelyn’s birth, he kidnapped his wife from the jewelry store at which she was employed, situated in the Ponce de Leon Mall in St. Augustine, Florida. He shot and killed eleven other people in the mall before forcing his wife into his car and shooting her. Evelyn has never met or corresponded with her father; has never visited him at the Florida prison where, condemned for his crimes, he will reside on death row until the sentence is carried out.

There are things you know in the very very dark core of yourself. You don’t know how they got there, but you know they are real.

Evelyn’s story is told through her insightful but chilling first-person narrative. She can’t recall when she first became aware of her father’s history — she has no “sit-down-and-have-a-serious-talk-with-my-mother memory” in her mind. But she has memories of other children taunting her at school. “A kid who sat next to me in reading group in first grade who whispered in my ear, My dad says your dad killed people, . . .” When she was six years old, she and her mother moved to Pass-a-Grille, a small beach town two hundred miles from St. Augustine, and they continue residing there with her mother’s partner, Shea. Evelyn has numerous new articles about her father bookmarked on her internet browser, but doesn’t open the links. She describes how she can never escape the knowledge that her father’s “actions are like a rock thrown in the water, creating a wake, circles of motion emanating from the center out, ripples in the surface. His actions ended ancestral blood lines, tore lovers apart, left children without mothers an fathers, made orphans and widows with each squeeze of the trigger. And now his actions overshadow him. He’s reduced to a mug shot, a name on a list 00 of mass murderers, mall murderers, death row inmates.”

And as his actions overshadow him, they hound and perplex Evelyn. She has moved from simply knowing what happened on that horrible day to needing to know why it happened.” And contemplating whether, because he was capable of committing such monstrous acts, she is inevitably like him and, therefore, also capable of killing.

Dietrich’s prose is eloquent — rich and evocative, almost rhythmic which, given that she is a poet is not surprising. She describes Evelyn’s feelings and inner struggle convincingly and empathetically. In Evelyn, Dietrich has drawn a complex, deeply trouble character. She has disturbing visions and has to remind herself that what she is seeing is not real. She maintains The Catalogue of Everything I’ve Done Wrong into which she enters details concerning acts about which she feels remorse or shame. Despite being raised by a loving mother, and living in a stable home with Mira and Shea, she wrest;es with self-doubt and tries to understand whether the dominant force in shaping her character has been nurturance or if, perhaps, she shares an inherently dark nature with her father. Dietrich says Evelyn is “grappling with her own identity and trying to figure out how to navigate the legacy her father has left through his violent act.”

The story moves at a steady pace, as Evelyn joins the support group and her friendship with the risk-taking Clarisse deepens. The two girls have much in common and embark upon a course of action fraught with danger that illustrates just how different they truly are. Dietrich’s examination of Evelyn’s includes staggering developments that are shocking, as well as heartbreaking. Evelyn and Clarisse are not typical American teenage girls. They are part of a distinct group who are involuntarily saddled with shame, notoreity, revulsion, and a desire for normalcy that perpetually eludes them because of the heinous actions of a family member. Dietrich deftly encourages readers to consider their plight and draw their own conclusions, even though she notes that she believes “we’re all at the mercy of both nature and nurture.”

Girl at the Edge is a fascinating study of one young woman’s circumstances that is not easy to walk away from after reading the last page. Readers will find Evelyn’s inner turmoil and actions haunting, and will likely never view a news story about yet another mass shooting the same way again.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received one electronic copy of Girl at the Edge free of charge from the author via Net Galley. I was not required to write a positive review in exchange for receipt of the book; rather, the opinions expressed in this review are my own. This disclosure complies with 16 Code of Federal Regulations, Part 255, Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.