Rabbit Heart: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Story -- Kristine S. Ervin - Hardcover

A Washington Post "Most Anticipated" Book of the Year

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

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.

Author: Kristine S. Ervin
Publisher: Counterpoint LLC
Published: 03/26/2024
Pages: 304
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.20lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.20w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9781640096370

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 01/08/2024
Kirkus Reviews 01/15/2024
Booklist 03/15/2024 pg. 26

About the Author
KRISTINE S. ERVIN grew up in a small suburb of Oklahoma City and now teaches creative writing at West Chester University, outside Philadelphia. She holds an MFA in poetry from New York University and a PhD in creative writing and literature, with a focus in nonfiction, from the University of Houston.