“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 … 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.
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My review of “Girl at the Edge” by Karen Dietrich
If you’re looking for a book that’ll leave you with the chills, then this is it! Karen Dietrich brings forth a topic of “legacy” and whether we are predestined to it or not. The storyline was a little harsh for me, hence the four stars, but the meticulous writing style is captivating to say the least. I found myself drawn into Clarisse’s world, wanting to know more. Girl at the Edge is an exceptional psychological thriller for anyone open to a little darkness.
Girl At The Edge reminds me of Defending Jacob and the Murder Gene. Only so much worse.
Or better.
Dietrich didn’t set out to write a book that would leave you feeling all happily-ever-after. She wrote a book that will make you examine your soul. She gives a poetic elegance to words that flow from one page to the next that leaves the reader afraid to blink for fear she will miss something.
Kudos to Ms. Dietrich, can’t wait to see what you do next.
“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.
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. 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.
Thanks to NetGalley for an Advance Reader’s Copy of the book.