Tuesday, December 15, 2009

The Murderer's Daughter-Randy Susan Meyers

The Murderer's Daughter
Randy Susan Meyers
St. Martin’s, Jan 19 2010, $24.99
ISBN: 9780312576981

In a rage their drunken father kills their mother and almost kills one of his daughters Merry. The child and her sister Lulu are sent to an orphanage. Lulu plays the system while the system plays Merry, but stay together as they forge a symbiotic relationship.

Lulu becomes a doctor, but hides her nightmarish childhood from everyone. Merry becomes a victim abdicate though she is totally dependent on Lulu and drugs. Merry visits her father while Lulu behaves as if he committed suicide on that fatal day three decades ago. Now he is being freed from prison; something neither of his children support as they fear the shadows he left them with when he committed the atrocity.

Rotating first person perspectives between the sisters, fans get a deep look at how a tragedy when they were children impacts them as adults. Ironically though Lulu and Merry seem like opposites as the audience observes and “listen” to both over the next three decades, they sound so identical that a reader would struggle to delineate who is relating their lives at a particular moment. This adds to the overall impact of a psychological thriller as beneath the public mask each never truly moved past the pivotal horrific incident. The Murderer’s Daughter is a profound look at the survivors coping throughout their respective lifetimes when a family member commits an atrocity; exponentially devastating when the trauma is also against another family member.

Harriet Klausner

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