Published in 2007 by Ecco
The story of Rebecca Schwart is sad, funny, terrifying and moving. Beginning with her birth on a ship in the New York Harbor as her family makes it's way to America from Germany, the lives of the Schwarts family are dark and sad. Her father, once a math teacher, is reduced to being a cemetery groundskeeper and gravedigger. Rebecca, the youngest of three children and the only girl, grows up in a dark stone cottage watching her hostile father drive her two brothers away as her mother becomes more and more shut in. The real story begins when her father kills her mother and himself, and she is able at last to begin anew as her own person and not as "the Schwarts girl" but as a new woman with a family to protect and secrets to keep buried.
This book was given to me by one of my coworkers at Barnes and Noble (a long time ago) and I recently found it in a stack in the corner. I am so glad that I read it though as it was a surprisingly good novel. Incredibly well written with passages that had the potential to make me laugh aloud or feel my heartbeat pounding in anxiety. At times, it veers dangerously close to being a bad drama, but seems to scrape itself in the right direction at the last moment. A moving story of life, and how we choose to live it. The main character transforms herself into a woman with secrets and troubles and yet manages to make her way through the world by learning from her mistakes and trying her hardest not to let any of them haunt her.
Quotes:
"In animal life the weak are quickly disposed of. So you must hide your weakness, Rebecca."
Rating: ****
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