Florence Grende's memoir The Butcher's Daughter is a family portrait drawn in lyrical style that examines the effects of war, and follows the narrator's search for her parents survival story during WWII in Poland. The short narratives about growing up with parents who are World War II Holocaust survivors is by turns funny, sad, violent and revelatory. In Grende's hands, this fraught subject is turned into an original, compelling work of art. Faced with the unfathomable suffering of her survivor parents, she writes of the bits and pieces of rage, pain, endurance, bafflement, confusion, grief and the overriding human will to live. Here is a story of a woman trying to move forward in the new land of America but who has been raised with the shades of the European dead for company. The terse, poetic prose makes the reader feel what it was like to grow up and live with silences that truly were unspeakable. In a clear voice that manages to be both haunted and compassionate, Grende reminds us that monster and victim can be one and the same. She tackles subjects as harsh as war and family dysfunction, always writing with an exquisite attention to sound and prose rhythms, reminding us, as all masterful writers do, that what you say matters because of how you say it.