Customer Reviews

A Family Daughter

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

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.

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 (terryms2001@yahoo.com)

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.

I looked forward to reading A Family Daughter because I thought it would be a continuation of the Santerres family saga. I'd liked the first book, Liars and Saints, very much. It came as quite a surprise to find the book was a rehash of the first book with changes in the story. This book became the 'true' story while the first book became the book that the main character, Abby, wrote. The biggest problem for me was that this 'true' story was far more unbelievable than the first book. While Liars and Saints seemed a bit unreal, this one was totally convuluted. I pushed myself to read the entire thing, but found it hard going. I wanted to see if there was any redeeming qualities to the book, but I found none. The only satisfying thing about the end of the book was that it was THE END!

Too cheesy, risque in odd and uncomfortable ways, and tried too hard to be unexpected. Yawn and meh.

This is the story of a girl growing up in a loving, caring, dysfunctional and intermittently Catholic family. Abby's mother is possibly the most damaged family member but definitely the least stable as a parent. Thankfully Abby has a responsible, loving father but then tragedy strikes and she's on her own....no worse, she has to parent her mom. She somehow gets through it and becomes a writer. In her first book Abby interweaves family fact and fiction leaving everyone debating what's real. I love Meloy and thought her 2009 short story collection `Both Ways is the Only Way that I Want It' was one of the best books of that year. I also loved her previous short stories `Half in Love' which was only a smidgen below the quality of `Both Ways' but `A Family Daughter', though well written, felt self indulgent, as if Meloy used it to get things off her chest. There was a central theme that was horrifying and that felt pointless unless the point was to normalize such behavior. I'm not against including unpleasant issues but not to make the ambiguity ok. There are some things it's not all right to be on the fence about.

I'm rating this book as a 3 but it's more like a 3.5. Meloy is wonderful and I think she's going to give us many great books in the coming years. If you were disappointed with this book please read some of her stories. Though more recent books share the similar theme of looking at the gray areas of life rather than seeing in only black and white she explores the shadows with more aplomb in her short stories.

After reading liars and saints, i wanted to read this book. It was pretty good.Kept my interest, but Kinda long. I feel some parts could have been cut out. By the last page I was ready for it to be over.

An uncle who sleeps with his niece, a mother who won't commit to her daughter, and a matriarch who looks back at her family and wonders why they are all so eccentric, wayward and willful. In A Family Daughter, author Maile Meloy returns to the Santerres family, telling her story from the perspective of Clarissa's daughter Abby who is about to attend university in San Diego.

Beautiful, confused and sensual, Abby is also emotional and complicated. She visits a therapist to try and make sense of her life, and has a close relationship with Ben, her father. But when Ben is killed in a car accident, Abby is set adrift - her mother, Clarissa is too distant and self-involved to take that much of an interest in her. Shaken to the core, she falls in love with her Uncle Jamie, a supportive influence since she was seven years old.

Of course, there's a question over whether Jamie is really Abby's uncle, but they're so hot for each other that they begin sleeping together. Abby also begins to write a novel about a Catholic family keeping secrets from each other. It's ostensibly a work of fiction, but it's also a thinly disguised veil of her own family, and it allows the major players to seek out part of their pasts, each attempting to find their own way.

A Family Daughter is richly observed and multi-layered and it keeps constantly diverging, introducing characters existing in the periphery of the Santerres' lives; at one stage, the narrative even switches gears to Argentina. There's a spoilt countess, a devious Hungarian prostitute, and a calculating French lawyer, with Meloy always contrasting these points of view, exposing the miscommunications, disappointments and expectations of this family and the people that fall within their radar.

Teddy, the patriarch, with his ailing eyesight and declining health wonders why his family make the kind of decisions they do and choose to live errant lives. An old style Catholic father, his beliefs made him rigid - he wonders why Jamie hadn't settled down the way he expected, and that his daughters lives were not what he wanted for them, "we all knew in all of these cases that he hoped that things would turn out differently," Teddy represents the old guard, wanting what is understandable and morally unambiguous and not filled with strife, "to trust Go and sow faith and Love."

At the novel's end, none of the characters ever really achieve Teddy's wishes: Clarissa remains capricious and selfish, the bored Margot reconnects with an old flame and throws herself into an affair, handsome Jamie marries for convenience not love, and the lovely Abby remains baffled at her family's dysfunctions and contradictions.

While A Family Daughter isn't as tightly plotted and as realistic as its prequel Liars and Saints, the novel is still an unusual examination of a modern American family in crisis, "a crazy invented family." The problem with a second novel is that it must prolong the curiosity of the first, move the story along and also keep the characters from becoming dull.

For those who enjoyed Liars and Saints, this novel is certainly an excellent connection to past characters as well as bridging the gap to the next generation. The good news is that A Family Daughter also works as a stand-alone novel; it's a compelling portrait of a family where faith, God and logic sit uneasily side by side. Mike Leonard April 06.

A sign of a good book: You start out warming to the book, but you grow to love the book more and more and more as you go along. That's the case for me with this book. I grew to love the characters so much that I did not want to get to the end. My favorite thing about this book (and, oddly, it's a thing that irritated me at first) is the author's way of telling a story, Hemingway-esque, very objectively, almost like Meloy is looking down on the whole story from above and just telling what she sees. What's true and what's made up in a book...this was a fun theme in the book. Abby was a fascinating character, but I also liked her uncle and Margot. I think there are probably a lot of us Margots among us readers.

No easy answers, no pat endings...Meloy perfectly reflects the ambiguity of our modern world. Wonderful book. I'm very happy to have read this one. It's definitely one for the reading groups who like to deal with psychological conflict.

This book was a decent book. It got to the point and went through things quick. Then about half way through things started slowing down and I couldn't help but wonder where the heck it was going it picked itself back up toward the 3/4 point and ended pretty decent.