A Serial Killer's Daughter

I think this would've been much better as an essay, or at least cut down by 150-200 pages. Some parts were definitely repetitive either in the message she was trying to convey or in actual wording. The first half and last quarter were incredibly boring. I'm very thankful for 2x audio. At the core, it's a very average person's memoir, written exactly as you'd expect an average person to write. Her descriptions of people were written in a very strange, contrived way (Ex: “we girls who shared the same color hair and eyes”). It's fairly easy, most of the time, to skip over all the religious bits or to see how those help her on her journey, though the end was a bit heavy-handed. She says, “God?” really often and writes out his “responses,” which was pretty bizarre. The overall writing voice seemed incredibly juvenile to me, made worse by a narrator who sounded like she was reading a children's book.

I was annoyed by how Kerri always referred to the female victims by what role they filled to someone else (mother, daughter, sister, grandmother). Those women didn't deserve to die simply because they were people, but Kerri seemed to mostly not understand how her dad could kill a mother with kids. I felt the way she included quick sentences of her father's crimes while recounting her childhood wasn't the best. I believe the victims deserved a little more than, “In x year, my dad killed x, a mother to 3 children,” and then abruptly moving on to a story about camping or her grandpa.

I struggled to feel sorry for her when the last straw for her for keeping in touch with her dad wasn't learning the details of the heinous crimes he committed or lack of remorse he showed. No. It was that he referred to her and the family as social contacts and pawns. To be fair though, my dad isn't a serial killer, so who knows where I'd draw the line myself.

I'm happy she found peace somehow, but this book just didn't work for me.