Rabbit Heart
A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Story
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4.0 • 13 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A Washington Post “Most Anticipated” Book of the Year • A New York Times “Must Read”
For readers of My Dark Places and The Fact of a Body, a beautiful, brutal memoir documenting one woman’s search for identity alongside her family's decades-long quest to identify the two men who abducted—and murdered—her mother
"Melding true crime with memoir, Ervin reminds us of what happens when we conflate people with the transgressions committed against them—the collateral damage we inflict when we turn human beings into moral allegory . . . A powerful treatise on love and loss, on mothers and daughters, but it is also a warning to all of us who consume true crime." —The New York Times Book Review
Kristine S. Ervin was just eight years old when her mother, Kathy Sue Engle, was abducted from an Oklahoma mall parking lot and violently murdered in an oil field. First, there was grief. Then the desire to know: what happened to her, what she felt in her last terrible moments, and all she was before these acts of violence defined her life.
In her mother’s absence, Ervin tries to reconstruct a woman she can never fully grasp—from her own memory, from letters she uncovers, and from the stories of other family members. As more information about her mother's death comes to light, Ervin’s drive to know her mother only intensifies, winding into her own fraught adolescence. She reckons with contradictions of what a woman is allowed to be—a self beyond the roles of wife, mother, daughter, victim—what a “true” victim is supposed to look like, and, finally, how complicated and elusive justice can be.
Told fearlessly and poetically, Rabbit Heart weaves together themes of power, gender, and justice into a manifesto of grief and reclamation: our stories do not need to be simple to be true, and there is power in the telling.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A woman struggles with life after her mother’s murder in this gut-wrenching memoir. After losing her mother as an eight-year-old, Kristine Ervin searches for meaning in the senselessness of that early tragedy. As she grapples with her grief—how to mourn, how to remember, and how to seek justice—she sometimes loses sight of herself as more than a secondary victim. Ervin is raw and lyrical as she describes her despairing, self-destructive mindset—including searching for love in the wrong places—and her quest for answers and healing. While her journey is a gripping personal story and tribute to her mother, Ervin also goes deep into the roots of violence against women in our culture. Rabbit Heart is thought-provoking, extremely personal, and socially relevant. It’s also a harrowing yet revelatory trip through tragedy and recovery.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
