THE SERGEANT’S DAUGHTER

“What I really imagine feeling when my dad passes is relief,” writes Shelton in her book’s introduction, which discusses her father’s funeral. The author was born in 1958 when her father, a specialist fourth class in the Army, was stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas. She and her two sisters, Debi and Karen, grew up in fear of a “critical and cruel” patriarch who was quick to “fly off the handle” and partial to dishing out brutal whippings with a belt. The author recounts her father cutting off his daughters’ ponytails and throwing them in the garbage because he felt the girls were obsessing about their hair. She remembers how he would call their mother “Lard-Ass” after she gained weight and hold “surprise weigh-ins” for the family. Shelton also recalls dancing with her dad, which would offer her a rare glimpse of happiness. The courageous and harrowing memoir focuses on the author’s childhood and teenage years when she set about evading her father’s grip. Shelton writes in a matter-of-fact manner, but she still possesses the power to shock. For example, she describes how, as a boy, her father had “rounded up the kittens from the barn and then dunked them in his kerosene” before setting fire to them. She reflects mordantly: “It helped me understand that when Dad said, ‘You better straighten up or I’ll light your ass on fire,’ he really meant it.” On another occasion, the author almost casually describes her and Karen wiping up “the blood splatters from the wall and hardwood floor” after a beating with a vacuum cord. This stomach-churning detail makes for a difficult read in which readers will brace themselves for what the sergeant will do next. Shelton’s steady, deceptively unemotional style may reflect an upbringing where she and her sisters were mocked for being crybabies. But there is also hope in the author’s laconicism: “My father did many things to try to break me. He did not succeed.” Despite the occasional typo (“all three left for War World II”), this is a powerfully cathartic memoir that recounts the horrors of abuse in painful detail.

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