GIRL AT THE EDGE

“My father is a murderer. Six months before I was born, he walked into Ponce de Leon Mall in St. Augustine, Florida. By the time he walked out, he was a murderer. When I say it out loud, something inside me gets bigger. Not noticeably so – in fact, only I can tell. I feel my rib cage expand, as if I'm breathing in as deeply as I can, only it's not air that I'm full of – it's something else. Sometimes it feels cold and I imagine mercury pooling inside me, liquid that makes me heavy and dense. Other times it feels hot as a grease fire, glowing lava running through me until I'm bright as the burning man.”

So begins Karen Dietrich's gripping, moving psychological thriller, The Bottom of the Deep Blue Sea, narrated with unforgettable intensity by conflicted sixteen year old Evelyn Gibson. Burdened by the unbearable weight of her father's breathtakingly violent act, which landed him on death row, Evelyn has for years burrowed deep inside herself, struggling to form a stable sense of who she really is even as she attempts to appear the ordinary teenager, living an ordinary life. Outside the ordinary, she also attends a support group for the children of incarcerated parents, meeting her mirror image in Clarisse, whose father is also under capital sentence. As Evelyn and Clarisse become tight friends and share thoughts and emotions that very few people can understand, they devise a secret “test” that they will one day put into practice when the moment is right. The test is intended to prove – or disprove – a haunting question: are they just like their fathers, do they bear their fathers' DNA, that of cold blooded murderers able to kill without hesitation or remorse, or have they escaped that brutal sentence?

This is a universal, unknowable issue we all wrestle with, to varying degrees - can we actually control our actions and shape who we are or are we helpless, the burden of heredity carried from the womb determining our lives and our fate. Will we for better or worse, become our mother or our father. An equally powerful unknown, also an integral part of the book and life, is whether loving, strong relationships have the power to save us from ourselves.

The writing here is first-rate: edgy, lyrical, suspenseful, insightful, the author always keeping the reader close to Evelyn. She is that rare character -- appealing and unnerving all at once -- and we turn the page with both urgency and foreboding. I think that The Bottom of the Deep Blue Sea is perfect for fans of such writers as Megan Abbot and Megan Miranda and hope you will agree.

Karen Dietrich is the author of The Girl Factory: A Memoir, based on her coming of age in a small manufacturing town outside of Pittsburgh and published to critical acclaim by Globe Pequot in 2013.