Rabbit Heart: A Mother's Murder, A Daughter's Story

by Kristine S. Ervin

For readers of My Dark Places and I'll Be Gone in the Dark , a beautiful, brutal memoir documenting one woman’s search for identity alongside her family's decades-long quest to identify the two men who abducted—and murdered—her mother

Kristine S. Ervin was just eight years old when her mother, Kathy Sue Engle, was abducted from an Oklahoma mall parking lot and violently murdered in an oil field. First, there was grief. Then the desire to what happened to her, what she felt in her last terrible moments, and all she was before these acts of violence defined her life.

In her mother’s absence, Ervin tries to reconstruct a woman she can never fully grasp—from her own memory, from letters she uncovers, and the stories of other family members. As more information about her mother's death comes to light, Ervin’s drive to know her mother only intensifies, winding its way into her own fraught adolescence. In the process of both, she reckons with contradictions of what a woman is allowed to be—a self beyond the roles of wife, mother, daughter, victim—what a “true” victim is supposed to look like, and, finally, how complicated and elusive justice can be.

Told fearlessly and poetically, Rabbit Heart weaves together themes of power, gender, and justice into a manifesto of grief and our stories do not need to be simple to be true, and there is power in the telling.

Genres: True Crime, Memoir, Nonfiction, Crime, Biography Memoir, Biography, Mystery

304 pages, Paperback

First published March 26, 2024

Reviews

[Celine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am shocked by the progression of this book. In the rarest of reading experiences, what started as excellent, turned brighter, stronger and more powerful with every page.
The author had me so completely captivated, so inside her head, that by the time I reached the end, it felt impossible to shut what I held in my hands.
A harrowing story on girlhood, womanhood, motherhood, grief and self-discovery, tied up with an impossibly satisfying bow.
(I don’t ordinarily rate anything related to a memoir, but as I want everyone to read this, I am making an exception)

[Jenna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy shit. This book should definitely win an award or something, and why isn’t it being talked about everywhere?


When the author was on the cusp of adolescence in the mid-80s, her mother was kidnapped by two young male strangers from the parking lot of a local mall where she was running an errand - and then was brutally assaulted and murdered. “Brutally Murdered” may sound redundant, but the emphasis is necessary in this case: what happened to the author’s mom is the epitome of a superlatively senselessly violent crime, the true stuff of nightmares.


It is excruciating to imagine the impact that such a traumatic loss of a parent, a mother no less, could have on a daughter, especially at this important and already challenging time of transition into young womanhood. It is excruciating to imagine the legacy of this trauma thereafter and its ongoing impacts on the author and her family.


And make no mistake: this book is excruciating, possibly the most excruciating I’ve read. It’s so raw and intimate that at times I felt like it was too raw and intimate, like something I shouldn’t be allowed to be reading at all, and yet it’s so skillfully done that it achieves the impossible of capturing and conveying indescribable and unimaginable pain and confusion.


One of the best and truest trauma memoirs I’ve ever read, if one of the most difficult, and so brave and as mercilessly, ruthlessly honest and searching and reflective and revealing as the author and her mother deserve. I honestly don’t know how the author did it. It feels like one would have no blood left in their body after writing something like this.


In addition to revisiting the evolving details of the horrendously violent criminal acts experienced by the author’s mother, readers should be also aware the book requires some pretty intense trigger warnings for sexual assault and abuse, including of the author as a teen struggling to navigate relationships and identity in the wake of her mother’s murder.

[tei hurst · Rating 5 out of 5]

a wordy review wouldn’t do this justice, but it’s impossible to leave this without remembering how haunting and beautiful memoir can be when done well.

[Panic!_at_the_Library · Rating 5 out of 5]

A more thorough review to come, but this book…just wow. So heart-wrenching and touching.

[Alissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 puĺling 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.

[Carol Irvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent memoir 📚 so hard to do a review- heartbreaking ❤️‍🩹

[Coffeedog · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF. I hardly EVER don’t finish a book. I got to almost 50% of this one, hoping hoping hoping it was going to get better, that the point of it would become clear. It did not. Just more of the same. Ick. I quit at the point she felt it necessary to tell her 63 year old father ALLLLLL the gruesome details from her teenage sex life. Why? Go to therapy - that’s where all this belongs. Don’t burden your aging father with things it’s too late to fix. How selfish. There just was NOTHING creative, therapeutic, redeeming in this book.

[melanie radley · Rating 1 out of 5]

Fainting couches and purple prose still sells--Ervin tells a horrific tale of a brutal and dehumanizing abduction, rape, and murder of her mother and the aftermath, a troubled family grappling for justice and individual peace or the alternative, coming to terms with the actualities of what happened, the loss of a woman who was a powerful force and the opportunity to confront one of the killers finally. For each, there's a final moment of clarity, self-awareness, and agency for Ervin. Unfortunately, she cloaks it in hysterical, overwrought hyperbole as she lurches from painful, emotional, teary breakdown, often in rural settings, lakes, graveyards, and cornfields-in and out of the arms of her husband, his description varying from the Victorian and romance novel, the shining hero, and the more prosaic best buddy of her brother and willing partner in the family drama. The fainting couch is metaphorical. No clutching of pearls (instead, it's her mother's empty gold locket), she substitutes the more psychological imagery of curling into a fetal position or huddling on the floor or comfort in her husband's arms. It's her memoir, after all, and she is a creative writing professor. She's excellent at describing emotional responses--and she envisions or experiences graphic rape and murder of her mother, her reenactment--like her mother with two men --but what gets lost in this flood of overwriting and the instance on the first person fixation are the others who were affected. What happened to them and who they are is mainly deduced through inference--brother Rolland, who works through his pain by becoming a lawyer, keeping the case alive, diligent, and systematic; a woman named Chris, who becomes a kind of surrogate mother and defacto psychologist, and her father who felt hopeless to raise a daughter who seemed to be acting out in self-destructive ways from her early adolescence--there's a mention in passing of being suspended from school for several months but no elaboration and finally her mother--who is described in fragments--the woman was a computer expert, again there a hint, carrying the printouts, when computers were mainframes and in their infancy--she was strong-willed, in a possibly troubled marriage, Ervin again alludes to both parents having affairs, a chain smoker--and devoted to her children. However, the father says she was not much of a mother. I kept reading because the book has importance--its clarity about the justice system's indifference to women victims, Ervin's struggle to find her distinct voice and confront the killer reading the impact statement rather than letting it be read aloud, adds to the growing literature of women brutalized, discarded, unnamed, and for which there is no natural justice or peace for those left behind. Unfortunately, instead of this wordy tome of emoting, Edvard Munch's The Scream says it all to me.

[kimberly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a memoir about grief, girlhood, motherhood, violence against women, and moving in to womanhood without a mother. Ervin weaves personal trauma and experiences, including the kidnapping and murder of her mother, with severely broken cultural beliefs surrounding crimes against women.

It’s a heavy read so do proceed with caution.

[Rachael S · Rating 3 out of 5]

“I hope she died like a bunny rabbit would”

Despite all the high-praising reviews, I simply could not indulge in this true crime novel. Initially when Good Reads had recommended Rabbit Heart, I was under the impression that this was a fictional story. It wasn’t until I went to my local Barnes and Noble where I discovered it was nonfiction (not a genre that I usually read).

Ervin details her grieving process in almost a diary format. Events are not in chronological order. There are shifts in narration; and the whole thing is written very poetically (also not a genre I usually read). Its format reminds me of Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker, where there is no real rhyme or reason to the raw emotion being shared.

Although there are some attention-grabbing scenes, I largely found myself struggling to stay awake when reading. For being less than 300 pages, it still took me the better part of a week to complete since I could only read a handful of pages at a time … ultimately not what you’d expect from a true crime novel.

I hate to criticize someone’s personal journey with grief, but the whole thing felt more like a self-help book for those experiencing a loss, rather than a true crime novel. It just wasn’t for me.

[⋆˚୨୧⊹♡Rissa♡ (sparklylibros) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow def not what I was expecting but like in the best way.
Firstly the writing in this is so beautiful & melancholic & easy to understand. It is able to elicit so many emotions while telling this harrowing story. & I lost count the amount of times I cried.
There is a strong theme of feminism that I wasn’t expecting but absolutely loved. The accounts of her girlhood to womanhood were so devastating but the ending was just so satisfying.
I will think about this for years to come & I will hug my mom a little tighter the next time I see her.

[Beth Farley · Rating 4 out of 5]

As others have said, it's really hard to rate memoirs. The event that precipitated this book is horrible and doesn't deserve any stars. But this is a well written, almost poetic at times, sad and brutal and sometimes uncomfortable and heavy read, but with a really amazing full circle moment that is hard to believe but so satisfying.

[Char · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having taken a class with Kristine, and imagining her writing would be like who she talks and explains things to us in class, I knew I was going to love reading this, but wow. This blew me away. I sobbed my way through this while on a bus and a train across india.

[A · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF forty pages in.

This book was tremendously heavy-handed, with overdramatic writing and no rise & fall of pacing (ie just one pace and style - dramatic - throughout).

The first two pages contain sentences like “I didn’t know love meant the willingness to suffer” and “it seems we’re always trying to recover something” ad nauseam. Every time Ervin wrote a sentence like this, it pulled me out of the story, leaving me feeling simultaneously leaden and aimless.

Rabbit Heart felt very juvenile/MFA and needed much more editing (and perhaps a more deft touch). DNF, though clearly others loved this book, so perhaps it just wasn’t for me.

[Catherine Hale · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was a tragedy that happened to this family, but it was another book about a sad woman with a dead mother, and she just seemed a little too into her trauma

[Priya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful is the word i would use to describe this book that reads like so much more than a true crime memoir.
The author's writing is so impactful and what she says is raw and unflinchingly honest, taking the reader into her mind and feeling her pain. Except it is a trauma no one else can fully understand other than those who have to live with it everyday.

When she was just 8, the author's mother was abducted from a mall and then brutally murdered. This violent and senseless crime shattered the innocence of her childhood and shaped her growing up years in ways that are difficult to read about. As she went on a journey of self-discovery without the presence of her mother to guide her and a father who comes across as largely clueless in many matters, her experiences with men, mostly way older than her were really horrific and she describes how her need to be loved drove many of her worst decisions. She also confronts the patriarchy that is still inherent in our world, that blames victims and holds women to different and impossible standards.

As she and her brother grew up, the pain of not knowing who was responsible for the murder of their mother haunted them. Years after every lead had been exhausted,DNA testing gave them new hope, starting off an investigation and a trial that rehashed everything that happened, putting the family through a new hell. Even the way journalists wrote about her mother and what was done to her was triggering for them to read because it felt so wrong.

This is as much about the aftermath of a crime on the victim's family as it is about the crime itself. Looking back on the precious memories she has of the time she spent with her mother, the author shares them with us while imagining confronting the killer who took her mother away from her. When she finally did have the details she wanted, the emotions she experienced were even more complex. The idea of 'revenge' that was driving her turned out to not be enough to fill the hollowness she felt even when the time to fulfill it seemed near.

Dealing with the loss of a parent as a very young child and being unable to articulate it is something I'm intimately familiar with and my heart went out to the author who had to suffer through this reality with so many unanswered questions while grappling with the absence of her mother and knowing the terrible way she died.

So many times it feels like reading about or being fascinated with crime, especially true crime, comes off as morbid or voyeuristic because everything is depersonalised to such an extent. The details are presented in such a matter of fact way, devoid of all feeling. It's all about the scene of the crime and evidence and police procedure. This book is very different from that. It is gut wrenching as the author talks about missing her mother and wanting to make sense of what cannot be made sense of. Towards the end in particular, as she and her family reckoned with the person who was responsible, it was heartbreaking to read about the emotions they fought to control.

The legal system is a quagmire and navigating it even in the quest for justice is a task that takes so much strength and that is so starkly illustrated here. We don't realise the time and distance between finding the perpetrators of a crime and bringing them to justice.

I have read true crime books and marveled at the perseverance of the investigators and the advancement in forensic techniques and the way they develop criminal profiles and go about catching them. I have also read books from a depraved killer's pov. This, however was a most unique perspective and not one that's presented very often because it must take such an enormous amount of guts to lay yourself open like this.
There are moments in the book where I wondered how she could even talk so candidly about it all but I understood that it was her way of dealing with the loss and the unexplainable sorrow. It is a very very personal story that she has put forth with a lot of courage and it deserves to be read with sensitivity.

Though the book is about losing a loved one, a beloved wife and mother, the author has also portrayed her mother in the way she wants her to be remembered and told her mother's story in her own words and that is beautiful. As is the way she has acknowledged the love and support of those who stood by her family and helped them through this ordeal.

This is a book that will stay with me for a very long time.

[Lizzy Eng · Rating 4 out of 5]

A devastating and exemplary use of memoir- the flexibility of the form lending itself to the messiness of memory and trauma. Some of the most impactful passages were inner monologues describing shame and self doubt with disarming honestly. There were many hard-to-talk-about topics that this booked talked about with nuance and perspective. The author unravels her experiences to reveal how all men act to uphold violent patriarchy, without flattening all acts of violence against women. Where this book lost me a little was in the last third and its approach to the criminal justice system. While I’m sympathetic that the author is relating to the system on a painfully personal level. It transformed into a victim right’s narrative and I wish that condemnation of violence against women and retributive justice could coexist.

(Check the trigger warnings before reading‼️)

[Karyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful writing, brutal honesty and exploration of pain and grief. That said, I found myself becoming impatient, wanting this to come to a conclusion. Living with devastating loss becomes its own lingering state of confusion and our imaginations can lead us into very dark despairs. In all honesty, I needed to move on more quickly from this.

[Tammy · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars. 🎧

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully written, gut-wrenching memoir about a daughter’s lifelong process of grief after her mother’s brutal murder. This is one of the most impactful memoirs I’ve read in recent memory.

Please be aware, though, that although (at least in my copy) there aren’t trigger warnings listed and although from the description readers can gather that the subject matter will be difficult, there is quite a bit of content not mentioned in the summaries on the book jacket/online that readers may find upsetting. For instance, there are lengthy passages with detailed and repeated depictions of physical and sexual assault, including scenes of dubious consent and sex involving minors. While the author is clear that she does not condone these actions, they can be shocking if you’re not prepared for them.

*4.5 stars rounded up*

[Kirstin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very difficult memoir to review. It is about the abduction, rape and murder of the author’s mother, when the author was just 8 years old. The majority of the book deals with the trauma of growing up without a mother and the destructive and self-sabotaging decisions she makes because of it. These are brutally and graphically detailed. It was very difficult to read at times.

The story is ultimately redemptive. A killer is brought to justice. A family is able to move on.

Rabbit Heart evokes shades of Know My Name, by Chanel Miller, but in a much more frank and pointed way. I would hesitate to recommend this memoir to the masses.

[Kenzie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I rarely write reviews on goodreads anymore however this book was absolutely heartbreaking. Ervin is able to convey her feelings surrounding the loss of a mother at a young age in a hauntingly beautiful way. She also does an amazing job of framing her mothers story in the context of living in a patriarchal society where violence perpetrated against women is interwoven into its very fabric.

[Vivian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I often get annoyed at the lack of self-awareness in memoirs, especially when authors refuse to grapple with the intangibility of memory and the effects of time and age on one’s own memories. Ervin does not lack self-awareness, and I was very impressed with how she interwove the perceptions of her teenage/young adult self with the critical thoughts of her older self in her excavation of her mother’s murder and the impact of the murder on her own girlhood. The prose is gorgeous, and my only complaint is that I found some bits a little repetitive and overwrought. Overall definitely worth the read, especially for the heartbreaking line (and ensuing explanation), “I hope she died like a bunny rabbit.” I can’t image losing my mother in such a violent way and being able to write so eloquently about it, even years later.

[Kiera LeBlanc · Rating 5 out of 5]

So raw and vulnerable. What a range of emotions packed into this book. I don’t know why more people aren’t talking about this one…i highly recommend!

[Theresa Stitt · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a raw, painful, powerful memoir. I was expecting the “true crime” chapters, but the honest reflection on her sometimes painful relationship with her father impressed me. The chapters on violence she’s experienced were the hardest to read, but arguably the most important and powerful parts of the book.

[Becky · Rating 4 out of 5]

“What happens to a 9-year old girl when her mother is murdered and the crime isn’t solved for 25 years?” For me, this is the question that haunts Kristine Ervin’s Rabbit Heart, a memoir that begins at the moment Kristin learns about her mother’s (Kathy Sue Engle) kidnapping (and, later, her murder). The memoir takes us through Kristin’s adolescence and into adulthood. It traces her often painful struggle to become a woman without a mother to guide her, her journey to understand her mother and hold onto her. and her family’s ceaseless efforts to keep the case in front of law enforcement until the perpetrator is finally captured and prosecuted. It also explores her relationships with men—the most painful parts of the book for me--and the ways violence reverberates through and shapes families and cultures (more about that later). (The title of the memoir, Rabbit Heart, alludes to a story Ervin recalls from childhood about a rabbit who dies of fright—without trauma or prolonged pain—and is what Ervin hoped had been her mother’s experience).

I’ll be honest. This is a difficult book to review because the subject matter is difficult to read. But it’s also a book you should read for this reason. Ervin is a powerful writer and her memoir is an excellent example of writing that is emotionally raw, deeply reflective, and well-researched. Ervin offers an unflinching critique of a culture saturated with images and messages about violence against women and the ways women are taught to accept, even encourage and perpetuate, violence against themselves. I found Kristin’s ability to weave back and forth between the personal and the cultural astounding. It’s too easy (and all too common) to think about violence in individual rather than cultural terms. Ervin refuses that easy out and forces us to confront the deep cultural roots of violence against women.

Some readers will find the book difficult to get through. I would urge these readers to push through the difficulty, though, because the book is also, even amidst the pain, a daughter’s testament of love to her mother.

Thank you to #netgalley for an advanced copy of the book. Rabbit Heart will be published by Counterpoint on March 26, 2024.

[Lee Collier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much like Know My Name this book examines our judicial systems, their inadequacies, and spans 30 years of forensics maturity. Kristine's story centers around the brutal loss of her mother under the hands of what were at the time two unknown men. There are multiple phases of the investigation that span from 1986 to the present and you are given a front row seat to the grief through her adolescence into adulthood.

There are moments of this book that are truly brutal as Kristine grapples with the loss day in and out wondering what it would have been like with a female guide in her life. Her father, left with two children, did what he thought was an ok job parenting but you can decide for yourself as the reader through the recounting of experience in her youth to the retelling of confrontation with her father as an adult.

This book made me sad. Simple as that. A memoir of a brutal act that crippled a family for generations. The sad thing is that this is only one of so very many devastating stories created out of murder and for absolutely no reason. An act of violence passed within seconds ripples through the lives left in the wake forever. As much as I hate that Kristen has had to carry this scar with her I am genuinely proud of her for the willingness to share.

[littlefoot_books · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rabbit Heart is an agonizing book to read, but it truly is one of the most well written memoirs about trauma that I have read. Ervin was only eight when her mother was abducted from a mall, then assaulted and murdered. Her body discarded in an oil field. This book is about her journey to discover just what exactly happened to her mother and identity the two men who committed the crime. It would take more than twenty years before a suspect was charged with her death.

Ervin recounts times in her life when she herself was physically and psychologically abused by men and holds those experiences up to her own mother’s exploitation. She explores “how we shift blame to women for the violence against their own bodies.”

It seems wrong to consume a memoir so personal and unflinching. It is an extremely difficult read, but I am better for it. Ervin’s gorgeous prose made it slightly less uncomfortable as I was able to focus on her lyrical writing in some sections, giving me some distance from the brutality of the subject matter.

In the right headspace, this memoir is one I absolutely recommend, especially if you are a regular consumer of true crime.

[Shaun Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disappointed! This would’ve been better if it was co-written because that would have lowered the drama. What happened was horrific, but it felt like the book was written in a way that protected the author as a victim. The reflections back on her sexuality & abuse/promiscuity didn’t help the story. Undoubtedly she was taken advantage of, but she also sought out sexual advances. It felt like the murder of her mother was somehow used as a way to explain it away partially. Having grown up in Oklahoma the story caught my eye, but it strayed too far from focusing on her mother & turned it into a psychological drama.

[Marian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly powerful, lyrical, horrifying, poetic. Extreme trigger warnings, not just for the details of the murder but for intense recountings of sexual assault. Had to take several breaks from reading or listening, but it was worth powering through. The ending is positively mind-blowing. I won't soon forget this book.