Rachael Hanel tells the story of growing up in a small town in Minnesota. Her father was a caretaker at the cemeteries, as well as a digger of graves.

The emphasis on cemeteries and graves in the book make their way onto the page of her blog, as well. Very educational and even entertaining to look directly at headstones and death, without flinching. While Hanel’s family story and history is very middle America (and I don’t mean that dismissively–it’s interesting for its specificity), the style she wrote the memoir in deviates from the norm. It is overwhemingly memoir-ish throughout, but also threads through journalistic techniques and in the last portion of the book even becomes more like a lyric essay–lyrical and reflective.

As a child, Hanel was interested in violent deaths, even reading Helter Skelter, the story of the Manson murders, at age eleven. This fascination is not surprising given the emphasis in the family on death. Adult reflection tells us she has learned this:

Reading became a protection; the words were a blanket I wrapped tightly around me. The stories helped me prepare for the inevitable. I surrounded myself with these words, reminders that bad things happen to good people. I read somewhere that we are drawn to stories of death and disease to convince ourselves that we would act differently. That somehow, by learning of someone else’s story we can protect ourselves. ( )

I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for a review.

This book has been sitting on my Kindle for months now so I finally decided to sit down and read it. I almost stopped reading it several times but stuck it out. The author writes about growing up as the daughter of a gravedigger just as the title suggests but I felt as if it was more a book of essays rather than a continuous story. I found myself asking lots of questions throughout the book that I never got answered to my satisfaction, if at all. ( )

I really wanted to like this book. The title alone made that happen. The gravediggers daughter writes about her life growing up in southern Minnesota in the 60s and 70s. Her family was of good upper Midwestern stock.

Her dad developed a business digging graves all around the area. He was good at it and took great pride in doing it well and respectfully.

The story is good. The writing is not. It is extremely overwrougt. It hurts to say that because I think she was pouring our her heart writing about her family. The book doesn't flow very well and is difficult to read. ( )