Book 40 of my 2019 Reading Challenge
read from June 8 - 18
After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search
by Sarah Perry
Summary (via Goodreads)
published 2017
When Sarah Perry was twelve, she saw a partial eclipse of the sun, an event she took as a sign of good fortune for her and her mother, Crystal. But that brief moment of darkness ultimately foreshadowed a much larger one: two days later, Crystal was murdered in their home in rural Maine, just a few feet from Sarah’s bedroom.
The killer escaped unseen; it would take the police twelve years to find him, time in which Sarah grew into adulthood, struggling with abandonment, police interrogations, and the effort of rebuilding her life when so much had been lost. Through it all she would dream of the eventual trial, a conviction—all her questions finally answered. But after the trial, Sarah’s questions only grew. She wanted to understand her mother’s life, not just her final hours, and so she began a personal investigation, one that drew her back to Maine, taking her deep into the abiding darkness of a small American town.
Told in searing prose, After the Eclipse is a luminous memoir of uncomfortable truth and terrible beauty, an exquisite memorial for a mother stolen from her daughter, and a blazingly successful attempt to cast light on her life once more.
The killer escaped unseen; it would take the police twelve years to find him, time in which Sarah grew into adulthood, struggling with abandonment, police interrogations, and the effort of rebuilding her life when so much had been lost. Through it all she would dream of the eventual trial, a conviction—all her questions finally answered. But after the trial, Sarah’s questions only grew. She wanted to understand her mother’s life, not just her final hours, and so she began a personal investigation, one that drew her back to Maine, taking her deep into the abiding darkness of a small American town.
Told in searing prose, After the Eclipse is a luminous memoir of uncomfortable truth and terrible beauty, an exquisite memorial for a mother stolen from her daughter, and a blazingly successful attempt to cast light on her life once more.
My Opinion
4 stars
The preface was an excellent starting point for the book; it was emotional yet clinical and I immediately wanted to know more both about the case and about her.
I had a moment's pause at the irony of her not correcting someone in person when they were talking in order to "let him keep his myth" of how certain events transpired but then going on to write about how wrong he was...maybe he's passed away?
I happened to have just started watching old "Forensic Files" episodes on Netflix so I'll have to see if the episode about this case is there. It would be interesting to put a face and voice with what I read.
A Few Quotes from the Book
"The prosecution kept the story necessarily simple: here's the man who killed her; this is how he did it. But a violent act is an epicenter; it shakes everyone within reach and creates other stories, cracks open the earth and reveals buried secrets. I want those stories, those secrets."
"Finding the man who'd killed her would mean once again imagining life if he hadn't. And I'd gotten so used to ignoring her absence. To pretending that I wasn't supposed to have a mother. That mothers were just something other people had."
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