The Murderer's Daughters

Sisters Merry and Lulu lost their parents at an early age — their father was hauled off to jail for killing their mother in their own home.

That left the girls with no one but each other, and in the new novel "The Murderer's Daughters," by Randy Susan Meyers, that bond is barely enough to survive.

The shadow of one despicable act proves all but impossible to overcome. Meyers, in a remarkably assured debut, details how the sisters process their grief in separate but similarly punishing ways.

Meyers lets Lulu and Merry tell their own stories in alternating chapters, skipping ahead several years at a time in some instances.

The device works beautifully, in part, because the author delivers unshakable truths at every turn.

The debut novel by Randy Susan Meyers -- whose family hails from Miami -- dives fearlessly into a tense and emotional story of two sisters anchored to one irreversible act of domestic violence. The narrative's dual narrators, Lulu and her younger sister Merry Zachariah, become innocent casualties when, in a terrifying scene relayed from Lulu's childhood perspective, their father murders their mother. Meyers painstakingly traces their lives to show just how much everyone else pays for that one act of violence.

Set in Brooklyn (where the girls start out) and Boston (where they live as adults) the novel is inspired by an event in Meyers' childhood (her mother, after fighting with her father, wouldn't let him in the house) and her experience working with abusers and victims in inner-city youth programs and as associate director for the city of Boston Community Centers.

This firsthand connection allows her to write with incredible detail about central and peripheral characters. She appears to know each one inside and out, and the thoughtful and specific details she observes about her characters make The Murderer's Daughters feel utterly real, elevating it above a one-dimensional tale of the repercussions of violence to a unique exploration of family bonds, sisterhood, maturation and self-sufficiency.

The book also offers dispassionate and perhaps resigned glimpses into government dysfunction in the area of child protection. The home for girls where the sisters end up is hardly a paradise. There, Lulu gets in fights, Merry's hair is chopped off, and both girls are isolated because they are Jewish.

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Randy Susan Meyers' "The Murderer's Daughters" (St. Martin's: 310 pp., $24.99) also examines a catastrophe that is no less devastating though only affecting two sisters. Lulu, age 10, let her father into the house. Five-year-old Merry got caught in the frenzy of her father's actions, when the knife meant for her mother also struck her. Men kill their wives all too often, but the after-effects are as unique as the individuals who are forced to cope with them. Lulu chooses to shut down, amplifying her survival skills and smarts to a career as a doctor with a family of her own, damping down the act through sheer force of will. Merry, however, stays close to her imprisoned father, and no other man will ever live up to him even as they collude in the breakdown of her confidence. How both sisters live, from the squalor of an orphanage to the empty silences of suburban living, is all too believable and heartbreaking because there is no acceptable answer for how to deal with one's part, as living victim, of a horrible crime -- only an often-lonely struggle to do what's supposed to be right that takes many more wrong turns

Randy Susan Meyers delivers a clear-eyed, insightful story about domestic violence and survivor’s guilt in “The Murderer’s Daughters.” It’s an impressively executed novel, disturbing and convincing. One stifling July day Lulu, just 10, disobeys her mother and allows her alcoholic father into their apartment. Moments later she finds her mother stabbed to death, her 6-year-old sister, Merry, badly wounded and her father with his wrists slashed, but alive. The father is sent to prison, and the children go to relatives, who don’t want them, then to an orphanage, then to a foster family, a well-meaning couple incapable of handling the girls’ emotional problems.

Through the years Lulu and Merry cope in different ways. Lulu tries to forget the past, becomes a doctor, a wife, a mother. She ignores her father’s letters, pretends he’s dead. Merry becomes a victim witness advocate, a job that has her reliving her own trauma. She tries to lose herself in sex and alcohol. She reads her father’s letters and visits him in prison. Though they react in different ways to their father, both daughters are haunted by him and dread the day he’s paroled. After a crisis threatens Lulu’s children, the sisters are at last able to confront the past.