There was much to enjoy here, but I found I couldn't connect with it. I'd read more from this author in the future though.

Really enjoyable read. Good characters and a Good story. Well worth a read. Think others will. Enjoy

Title: The Undertaker’s Daughter
Author: Kate Mayfield
Pages: 368 Pages
Publisher: Gallery/Threshold
The Blurb
What if the place you called “home” happened to be a funeral home? Kate Mayfield explores what it meant to be the daughter of a small-town undertaker in this fascinating memoir evocative of Six Feet Under and The Help, with a hint of Mary Roach’s Stiff.
The first time I touched a dead person, I was too short to reach into the casket, so my father picked me up and I leaned in for that first, empty, cold touch. It was thrilling, because it was an unthinkable act.
After Kate Mayfield was born, she was taken directly to a funeral home. Her father was an undertaker, and for thirteen years the family resided in a place nearly synonymous with death. A place where the living and the dead entered their house like a vapor. The place where Kate would spend the entirety of her childhood. In a memoir that reads like a Harper Lee novel, Mayfield draws the reader into a world of Southern mystique and ghosts.
Kate’s father set up shop in a small town where he was one of two white morticians during the turbulent 1960s. Jubilee, Kentucky, was a segregated, god-fearing community where no one kept secrets—except the ones they were buried with. By opening a funeral home, Kate’s father also opened the door to family feuds, fetishes, and victims of accidents, murder, and suicide. The family saw it all. They also saw the quiet ruin of Kate’s father, who hid alcoholism and infidelity behind a cool, charismatic exterior. As Mayfield grows from trusting child to rebellious teen, she begins to find the enforced hush of the funeral home oppressive, and longs for the day she can escape the confines of her small town.
In The Undertaker’s Daughter, Kate has written a triumph of a memoir. This vivid and stranger-than-fiction true story ultimately teaches us how living in a house of death can prepare one for life.
The Review
I genuinely do not know what to make of The Undertaker’s Daughter by Kate Mayfield. I’m torn between two emotions. One, if you imagine that it is a fictional story it is quite palatable in its unassuming nature. It is a quiet novel that reveals what life is like during a certain time and place and how social changes are juxtaposed with the death surrounding the undertaker’s home. However, knowing that it is a memoir and that the above observations still count the more pressing question comes to my mind – who actually needs to read this?
That sounds terribly unfair and this is not a question of whether or not The Undertaker’s Daughter is well written – it is. It is just that as a reader I don’t know Kate Mayfield to want to read about her life. Gosh, that sounds awfully cruel but it is the truth. If The Undertaker’s Daughter was a fictional text I would have enjoyed it a bit more. Knowing that it is a memoir of someone that I don’t know just makes me wonder why I would be reading it.
The Undertaker’s Daughter by Kate Mayfield is available now.
For more information regarding Kate Mayfield (@KateMayfield) please visit www.katemayfield.com.
For more information regarding Gallery (@GalleryBooks) please visit www.instagram.com/gallerybooks.