The Murderer’s Daughters

This is a book that I bought on a whim while browsing around Target. I saw that it had the Target Book Club seal, so I figured it had to be pretty decent. This is the first book I’ve ever purchased blindly without reading any reviews and I’m going to have to do it more often, because this book was very good and it pleasantly surprised me.

Review from Target:



The Murderer’s Daughters follows two sisters, Merry and Lulu, left on their own after their father murders their mother, and how the tragedy that changed their lives in an instant haunts each of them distinctly and profoundly as they make their way in the world together. Lulu and Merry's childhood was never ideal, but on the day before Lulu's tenth birthday their father drives them into a nightmare. He's always hungered for the love of the girls’ self-obsessed mother; after she throws him out, their troubles turn deadly. Lulu had been warned to never to let her father in, but when he shows up drunk, he's impossible to ignore. He bullies his way past Lulu, who then listens in horror as her parents struggle. She runs for help, but discovers upon her return that he's murdered her mother, stabbed her five-year-old sister, and tried, unsuccessfully, to kill himself. Lulu and Merry are effectively orphaned by their mother’s death and father’s imprisonment, but the girls’ relatives refuse to care for them and abandon them to a terrifying group home. Even as they plot to be taken in by a well-to-do family, they come to learn they’ll never really belong anywhere or to anyone—that all they have to hold onto is each other. For thirty years, the sisters try to make sense of what happened. Their imprisoned father is a specter in both their lives, shadowing every choice they make. One spends her life pretending he's dead, while the other feels compelled, by fear, by duty, to keep him close. Both dread the day his attempts to win parole may meet success. A beautifully written, compulsively readable debut, The Murderer's Daughters is a testament to the power of family and the ties that bind us together and tear us apart.

The book wasn’t one of the happier stories that I’ve read, but it was so honest. The author did a wonderful job of telling the story from Merry and Lulu’s perspectives. It was broken into parts and showed the progression through their lives of coming to terms with the untimely death of their mother and having an incarcerated father.

Book in a nutshell: Great book that makes you appreciate the family you have!