Girl at the Edge
-
-
3.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
"Karen Dietrich can stop your heart with a sentence."
--Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife
Not a single resident of St. Augustine, Florida, can forget the day that Michael Joshua Hayes walked into a shopping mall and walked out the mass murderer of eleven people.
He's now spent over a decade on death row, and his daughter Evelyn - who doesn't remember a time when her father wasn't an infamous killer - is determined to unravel the mystery and understand what drove her father to shoot those innocent victims.
Evelyn's search brings her to a support group for children of incarcerated parents, where a fierce friendship develops with another young woman named Clarisse. Soon the girls are inseparable, and by the beginning of the summer, Evelyn is poised at the edge of her future and must make a life-defining choice. Whether to believe that a parent's legacy of violence is escapable or that history will simply keep repeating itself. Whether we choose it to or not.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the start of poet Dietrich's arresting if flawed debut, teenager Evelyn Gibson reveals: "Six months before I was born, my father walked into Ponce de Leon Mall in St. Augustine, Florida. When he walked out, eleven people were dead. My father is a murderer." Her father, whom she has never met, is now on death row in a Florida state prison. Her mother, a preschool teacher, has since remarried, and the couple have always tried to provide a supportive and positive environment for Evelyn, but are unaware of her struggles to understand her father's actions and her own darkly disturbing thoughts. As Evelyn says, "I am alone in this, and that's how it has to be because who wants to stand with the girl at the edge, staring down into the nothingness below? Who wants to be there to see the moment she lets go?" Original metaphors and nice descriptions bolster this extended monologue of a potential killer, but it lacks suspense and variation in tone. Still, Dietrich's assured prose bodes well for the future.
