Some stories I’ve told again and again.
Like how the detectives stood in our kitchen, the table piled high with tackle boxes and plastic bags. I was eight then, and they pulled strands of hair from our scalps and held our fingers in their gloved hands. How tiny the arcs of my fingerprints must have been, each one placed in a square on the card, their lines like cresting waves. I remember holding it up to the light above our kitchen table, as if it were a map of some kind, but I never thought to look for letters or for symbols.
But other stories are unsayable. I’ve tried to write about Nina Athanassiades again and again, but the language fails me each time. I tell myself to write around it. To cluster those pieces. But they are simply too beautiful to touch.
― Kristine S. Ervin, Interview, Crime Reads
What booksellers are saying about Rabbit Heart
- I could never anticipate how satisfying the ending of this story unfolded. Reading this reminded me of The Postcard by Anne Berest; jaw-dropping simplicity and sincerity directly from a person who survived a major trauma inflicted on their family as truth is revealed that you assume would be lost to the passage of time… Books like this give me hope that beauty can truly overcome even the direst of circumstances. How proud her mother would be of her for pulling together such a triumph of a book: to honor memories of the before, to allow space to heal, and to give voice and power back to those who deserve it..
― Alissa Redmond, South Main Book Company in Salisbury, North Carolina | BUY
- It was so beautiful, I could barely breathe. So compelling, I couldn’t put it down—but I ached the entire read. Rabbit Heart pulled power and beauty out of such grief–it’s a work of exceptional writing.
― Kendra Gayle Lee, Bookish Atlanta in Atlanta, Georgia | BUY
- What James Ellroy’s My Dark Places did for motherless sons, Kristine Ervin’s Rabbit Heart does for motherless daughters. And then some. This memoir is a disturbing, poetic, heartrending examination of how her mother’s murder hit her life like an earthquake, with tremors lingering until the present day..
― Sam Miller, Carmichael’s Bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky | BUY
About Kristine S. Ervin
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.
