A Family Daughter [Audiobook] [Audio Cassette]

Maile Meloy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 30, 2006

It is 1979, and seven-year-old Abby, the youngest member of the close-knit Santerre family, is trapped indoors with chickenpox during a heat wave. The events of that summer will change her family's lives for ever. In A Family Daughter, Maile Meloy returns to the complicated world of the Santerres. This captivating story of an American family in crisis is told from the view of Abby, a young woman grieving for her father and rediscovering the family she always thought she knew. An engaging and insightful novel about the joys and complications of modern life, A Family Daughter is a delicious read. For everyone who has yet to meet the Santerres, an unmatched pleasure awaits.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Family Santerre, first introduced by Maile Meloy in her 2003 novel, Liars and Saints, is back again, inspected and reported on from another angle. This time, in A Family Daughter, granddaughter Abby is the narrator. She is left with grandmother Yvette when she is seven, suffering in equal parts from chickenpox and boredom. Her mother, Clarissa, is off trying to remember what it was to be happy. Feckless Uncle Jamie is called upon to entertain Abby. A bond is formed between them at that time that has far-reaching consequences.

This family is the most chaotic bunch of narcissists to come along in some time. Yvette and Teddy, matriarch and patriarch, are devout Catholics on whom some of their childrens' antics are, fortunately, lost. Jamie is another centerpiece of the novel: funny, charming, libidinous slacker that he is, he is temporarily irresistible to everyone. Abby hits a bad patch in college after the death of her father and Jamie is there to console, and sleep with her. The impact of this event (eight events, really) results in a book, maybe fiction, maybe true, that eventually has the whole family on its respective and collective ear.

Abby's Aunt Margot, exemplary wife and mother, on automatic pilot for thirty years, suddenly leaves home to find a former lover. Clarissa might be a lesbian, she isn't sure. Abby, now happily ensconced with her former T.A., Peter, is lured to Argentina by Jamie to help care for his libertine fiancee's mother's adopted child. And, that's just a peek at what's going on. Convoluted? Yes, but it all works. Meloy can write the socks off most authors. She maintains an ironic distance from her characters in prose that you absolutely cannot stop reading until you find out every last detail. The whole shebang culminates in a Christmas celebration with everyone present. Not your ordinary singing-around-the-piano event. May the Santerres continue to thrive in Meloy's imagination! --Valerie Ryan --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In evanescent scenes distinguished by clean, wry prose, Meloy observes the Santerre family, whom readers met in 2003's Liars and Saints, from a crafty new angle. The book opens as the deeply Catholic Yvette Santerre frets over her granddaughter, Abby, who has the chicken pox and has been deposited in Yvette's care while her mother, Clarissa, tries to remember what it's like to feel happy. Yvette and Teddy's eldest daughter, Margot, is repressed by her own Catholicism and veering into adultery; Clarissa thinks of her husband, Henry, and daughter, Abby, as "captors" keeping her from realizing her true potential; and happy-go-lucky son Jamie has little ambition beyond his next girlfriend. With Abby at the story's center, the narrative moves forward years in effortless leaps, revealing the secrets and dissatisfactions of all. From Abby's rocky childhood to her bruising young adulthood (her parents divorce; her father is killed in a car accident), she finds solace with Jamie, 12 years her senior. When Abby is 21, uncle and niece fall into an affair, until Jamie is lured away by the bored, rich, chronically unfaithful Saffron, who suffers her own difficult mother crisis in Argentina. Clarissa takes up with a lesbian and confronts her mother with recovered memories; Jamie becomes convinced he's actually Margot's daughter; and dreamy, conflicted Abby writes a roman à clef (Liars and Saints!) about them all. Meloy shifts point of view fluently, and though her characters weather all sorts of melodrama, the novel itself feels light—poignant and affecting, meaningful yet somehow weightless. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Audio Cassette
• Publisher: Isis Audio; Unabridged edition (October 30, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0753136198
• ISBN-13: 978-0753136195
• Shipping Information: View shipping rates and policies
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)

More About the Author

Maile Meloy is the author of the story collection Half in Love and the novel Liars and Saints, which was shortlisted for the 2005 Orange Prize. Meloy's stories have been published in The New Yorker, and she has received The Paris Review's Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in California.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Very disappointing, March 19, 2006

By 

M. Crenshaw "bookwoman" (Miami FL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Family Daughter: A Novel (Hardcover)

I loved Maile Meloy's story collection, Half in Love, and also enjoyed Liars and Saints. I had really been looking forward to A Family Daughter but I am just so disappointed! The plot is often ridiculous,and the characters just aren't credible enough to carry the book. Much of it is extremely predictable and reminded me of a soap opera. The dialogue just doesn't make sense. A five year old, for example, can speak in complete sentences in real life. This one, a key character, just keeps saying one word, "Dogs!" over and over again. I think the difference with this book is that it is completely invented, Half in Love was obviously something she knew from growing up in Montana, and you felt the place and the people resonate through her eyes. This book is just not her best. I am half way through and I can completely understand why other reviewers said they didn't finish it.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An absorbing sequel, February 22, 2006

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Family Daughter: A Novel (Hardcover)

The story of the Santerres is continued from LIARS AND SAINTS in this tale told from the point of view of several of the characters. When Abby is seven, her mother and father are separating. Abby stays with her grandparents, developing chicken pox and a close relationship with her college-aged uncle Jamie, who comes home to entertain and delight his niece.

After the divorce, Abby lives in a joint custody arrangement --- a month with her warm but strict lawyer father alternating with a month with her free-spirit mother and her mother's multitude of boyfriends. Abby grows up and decides to go to college at the University of San Diego, maybe partially because that's where her parents met, were happy together, and conceived her.

Tragedy strikes the family and Abby falls apart. She leaves school, cannot eat, and refuses to be consoled. She takes off on her own, and is far too alone until Uncle Jamie comes to help her, once again rescuing her from a dreary stretch. In the midst of a startling new twist in their relationship, Jamie learns a potentially devastating (if true) family secret, which he's afraid to confirm. Meanwhile, Abby becomes fascinated by what lies beneath the surface of family connections. She begins a novel based on her own family, embellished with her imagination.

Jamie becomes besotted with and then engaged to odd, beautiful, chronically unfaithful Saffron. Saffron asks him to come with her to Argentina to help with a family disaster of her own: her mother, Josephine, who has recently adopted a baby, now has been stricken with dementia. Jamie and Saffron request Abby's company on the trip to translate for the child who speaks only Spanish. In Argentina, settled into the gothic atmosphere of Josephine's mansion, their situations change rapidly. There is a death, a potential blackmailer, and a questionable will. Out of the chaos, an unexpected family unit is formed.

Abby finishes her novel; following its publication, her family is concerned over the facts and fictions contained in her book. Amazingly, some of the most astonishing true events in the story are regarded as pure fiction and vice versa. In real life, family members are galvanized to surprising actions by memories triggered by Abby's book.

From the moment I opened A FAMILY DAUGHTER, I was completely absorbed in Abby's life and would happily have read it in one sitting if Real Life hadn't kept interfering. The characters are entirely believable. It is a fascinating look into extended connections and repercussions of actions among family, friends and lovers. Without being one bit overwrought (in fact, the prose is nicely understated), this book is crammed full of drama: deaths, depression, infidelity, drugs, secrets and lies, illicit affairs, madness, obsession, mysterious strangers, love of all kinds, an inheritance, adoptions, and more. The author has a unique gift for unforeseen yet reasonable plot twists that makes for delightfully unpredictable reading.

Although this book continues the story of the Santerre family begun in the author's previous novel, LIARS AND SAINTS, it is a stand-alone story that can be read and enjoyed for its own merits. However, readers of A FAMILY DAUGHTER who have not yet delved into LIARS AND SAINTS most likely will be compelled to search for it immediately.

--- Reviewed by Terry Miller Shannon ([e-mail])

15 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars History rewritten, April 8, 2006

By 

JoAnne Goldberg (Silicon Valley, CA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Family Daughter: A Novel (Hardcover)

Half the considerable charm of Family Daughter is the fact that Meloy revisits her earlier work, Liars and Saints, and deftly twists the plot points and characters, creating a brand new dish with the same ingredients.

Family Daughter realizes the potential that Meloy first displayed in Liars and Saints, a book that left me reeling, sort of like flipping through a photo album on warp speed. (In the space of a few pages, Clarissa is pregnant with Abby, Abby is born, grows up, and dies.) The characters blurred together in the finest soap opera fashion, and getting to the end of the book felt like winning a race: I'd covered a lot of ground but if there were roses to stop and smell, I hadn't glimpsed them.

So I appreciated Meloy's willingness to reintroduce us to Abby and to give us a chance to get to know this complicated, often confused, but ultimately insightful protagonist. Not only that, Meloy relaxes enough to have fun, introducing eccentric charmers such as the deliciously-named Saffron and devilish Uncle Freddie.

Having skimmed the other reviews, I can't sign off without addressing the negative comments I saw.

First, you want serious literature? Please, help yourself, put this book down and dust off the Tolstoy or Proust. Daughter was not written to be the foundation of your Ph.D. dissertation.

Next, the whines about the lack of congruency between Liars and Daughter. From my perspective, one of the coolest aspects of Daughter is that whole parallel universe thing. After Abby publishes her family novel, the reader is left wondering whether Abby's novel was actually Liars and Saints--there are hints that many of the key elements of Liars, notably the "who's your mama" mystery/scandal, were concocted by the family daughter. But if you spend too much time trying to figure out the chicken-and-egg relationship here, you may risk undermining your enjoyment of the book.

Bottom line: as refreshing as a lime spritzer and perfect for the beach. Meloy's found her pace with this one, and (as long as you try not to get too nitpicky) you will not regret the hours you spend with Abby and family.