After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, A Daughter's Search

I read this with the Kindle app on my phone. It is a library copy

 obtained through Overdrive. Technology is wonderful!

A fierce memoir of a mother’s murder, a daughter’s coming-of-age in the wake of immense loss, and her mission to know the woman who gave her life.
When Sarah Perry was twelve, she saw a partial eclipse of the sun, an event she took as a sign of good fortune for her and her mother, Crystal. But that brief moment of darkness ultimately foreshadowed a much larger one: two days later, Crystal was murdered in their home in rural Maine, just a few feet from Sarah’s bedroom. The killer escaped unseen; it would take the police twelve years to find him, time in which Sarah grew into adulthood, struggling with abandonment, police interrogations, and the effort of rebuilding her life when so much had been lost. Through it all she would dream of the eventual trial, a conviction—all her questions finally answered. But after the trial, Sarah’s questions only grew. She wanted to understand her mother’s life, not just her final hours, and so she began a personal investigation, one that drew her back to Maine, taking her deep into the abiding darkness of a small American town. Told in searing prose, After the Eclipse is a luminous memoir of uncomfortable truth and terrible beauty, an exquisite memorial for a mother stolen from her daughter, and a blazingly successful attempt to cast light on her life once more.

I found this memoir on a list of recommendations and was quite surprised to find that it takes place in the little town in Maine where we have a vacation home. The shops and streets and the Italian restaurant that figures largely on the night of the murder are all so familiar.

I would have found the story compelling even without the familiarity of the setting. It is told by a woman whose young, beautiful mother is brutally murdered while her 12-year-old self hides in the next room. She tells of her family background, marked by violence and dysfunction, as well as her struggles to make a better life for herself, a life very different from her mother's and one that her mother would want for her.