Review by Booklist Review
Ervin was eight years old when her mother was abducted, raped, and brutally murdered. Twenty-five years later, at the plea hearing, Ervin confronts the man who killed her mother and tells him, "You will die behind bars and barbed wire, [. . .] while I, I will be living a life absent of you." In this lyrical, genre-defying memoir, Ervin intertwines the painful and tedious search for her mother's killer with overarching themes of grief, gender, and coming-of-age. She examines all of her experiences through the lens of her mother's absence, tenderly asking what her life would be like if her mother hadn't been taken from her. She writes about going through puberty, getting her period for the first time, and being sexually abused. Her observations around gender are particularly sharp and at times heart-wrenching. No matter how hard the material, and it's all either hard or bittersweet, Ervin approaches her story with unflinching vulnerability. Throughout, she's also searching for meaning and reckoning, which she eventually finds alongside her brother, "through the power of language and grief." This may be the best way true crime should be written, with nuance and unfettered compassion and with the words of the living victims or their families at the center.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Poet and essayist Ervin grapples in her moving debut memoir with the emotional damage caused by a parent's violent death. In 1986, when Ervin was eight years old, her mother, Kathy, was kidnapped from an Oklahoma shopping mall. Days later, her body was found in an oil field, but it would be years before the details of her rape and murder were revealed, and decades before a suspect was identified. Ervin writes candidly of the ways her mother's absence and the lack of closure around the case left her ill-equipped to handle hardships including sexual abuse from the men in her life and a sour relationship with her father. Then, in 2008, long after Ervin had given up hope for a conviction, a DNA match turned up the name of one of the men who abducted her mother. He was already incarcerated for an unrelated crime, and agreed to extend his previous sentence to life in prison instead of standing trial or submitting an admission of guilt. (The second suspect was identified two years later, after his death.) In lucid prose, Ervin unflinchingly documents her grief and untangles how her mother's murder impacted myriad aspects of her life. This will haunt readers long after they've turned the last page. Agent: Mary Krienke, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Mar.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
The story of the author confronting the lifelong impact of her mother's murder. When Ervin was 8 and her brother, Rolland, was 13, her mother left to return a dress to a mall in Oklahoma City and never returned. Soon, the family learned that their mother, Kathy Sue Engle, had been kidnapped, raped, and murdered, and her body was found in an oil field in the neighboring town of Sayre. In the years that followed, Ervin watched as police falsely accused two men of the murder, only to revisit the case decades later when DNA matched that of a man serving a prison sentence for assaulting another Oklahoma woman. "It's too beautiful--the fingerprints with the alphabet in their cores, text and body and text, Rolland fighting through the law, me fighting through my words, my mother's killer found through the power of language and grief," writes the author, whose work as a teacher of creative writing shines through on every page. While the last third of the book follows the ensuing trial, much of the narrative involves Ervin's psychological and emotional reactions and broader explorations of physical, sexual, and emotional violence, especially "how we shift blame to women for the violence against their own bodies." Throughout, the author's investigations of the concept of victimhood are insightful and urgent, and she demonstrates how "so many victims are silenced and excluded from the process" of punishing the perpetrators. Ervin laces the poetic text with unforgettable moments of startling, shattering honesty, many of which feel impossible to witness. This is the genius of the author's prose and what makes this book remarkable: Ervin's unflinchingly brutal gaze, combined with her insistence on facing the worst parts of her past, make it equally impossible for us to look away. A devastating memoir about living with--and dying from--gender-based violence. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
