Yes, My Darling Daughter: A Novel [Hardcover]

Margaret Leroy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 14, 2009

Every once in a blue moon, a masterful writer dives into gothic waters and emerges with a novel that—like Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Minette Walters’s The Breaker, and Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend—simultaneously celebrates and transcends the tradition. Welcome Margaret Leroy to the clan.

 

What’s the matter with Sylvie?

 

Such a pretty girl. Four years old; well loved by her young mother, Grace. But there’s something . . . “off ” about the child. Her deathly fear of water; her night terrors; most of all, her fixation with a photo of an Irish seaside town called Coldharbour.

 

“Sylvie, tell me about your picture. Why’s it so special, sweetheart?” My heart is racing, but I try to make my voice quite calm.

 

“That’s my seaside, Grace.” Very matter-of-fact, as though this should be obvious. “I lived there, Grace. Before.”

 

Grace doesn’t know what to do with this revelation—she’s barely scraping by as it is. A single mother with no family, Grace works full-time at a London flower shop to support herself and Sylvie. Overwhelmed by her inability to help her daughter, she turns to Adam Winters, a dashing psychology professor with some unusual theories about what might be troubling the child. Together, they travel to seemingly idyllic Coldharbour, hoping to understand Sylvie’s mysterious connection to the place. Impossible as it may seem, Grace has to accept that her daughter may be remembering a past life. And not only that: the danger bedeviling Sylvie from her past life is still very much a threat to her in this one.

 

Margaret Leroy has been celebrated for writing “like a dream,” and her previous novels have been praised for their “hypnotic prose” and “sensuously ethereal, subtly electric drama.” Now, in Yes, My Darling Daughter, Leroy offers a novel both haunted and haunting—a wonderfully original, deliciously suspenseful story that enthralls from the first page to the very last.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Fans of old-fashioned gothics will welcome this tale of love, betrayal and death from British author Leroy (The River House). At first glance, Grace, a single mom, and Sylvie, her bright, lovely child, have a simple, happy life. Though Grace struggles to make ends meet, all is well until Sylvie begins to act out at preschool and with playmates. She has tantrums, makes odd remarks and has an extreme fear of water. As Sylvie's behavior worsens, Grace is at a loss to explain her daughter's outbursts. She seeks help, only to find herself and their lifestyle to blame. When Sylvie recalls what seem to be past-life experiences, Grace looks up a university professor who's studied the paranormal in the hope he can resolve Sylvie's increasingly erratic behavior. Heavy with atmosphere and rich in detail, Leroy's prose lures readers into a disturbing murder mystery. Her characters are as realistic and intriguing as her locales in England and Ireland. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School—Single mother Grace dotes on four-year-old Sylvie. However, the child's behavioral issues, such as her intense fear of water, screaming fits, night terrors, and unusual social responses, are getting worse. After a meltdown causes Sylvie to get kicked out of her preschool, Grace doesn't know where to turn, until she reads about Adam Winters and the Psychic Institute in a magazine. Adam is a researcher who, among other things, studies troubled children to see if they are experiencing traumas from a past life. Using clues Sylvie has given her—a picture of a coastal Irish town, her fear of water—Adam and Grace manage to find out what may be the source of Sylvie's troubles. Despite a ghostly feel, the book isn't scary so much as mysterious in the way of old gothics like those of Victoria Holt. It unfolds slowly, but somewhat predictably, just like life in the Irish seaside setting. There is quite a bit of suspension of disbelief, much of it based on handy coincidences rather than the past-life angle. However, those who like Victorian gothics will enjoy getting to know Sylvie and Grace.—Jamie Watson, Harford County Public Library, MD
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (April 14, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374126011
• ISBN-13: 978-0374126018
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #776,877 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Margaret Leroy has written five previous novels. Her first novel, Trust, was televised in the UK. Postcards from Berlin was a New York Times Notable Book, and Yes, My Darling Daughter was chosen for the summer reading list in O, the Oprah magazine. Margaret is married with two children and lives in London.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Page Turner, September 22, 2009

By 

Bibliophile By the Sea (US) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Yes, My Darling Daughter: A Novel (Hardcover)

Grace is a single mom, who works in a flower shop full time, and spends her free time with Sylvie, her sweet little four year old daughter. The two live a simple life, in a not so great part of London, but their life seems happy enough. All seems perfectly normal with Sylvie until she begins having problems in preschool. She has outbursts, exhibits an extreme fear of water, and says odd things to her playmates. She also refuses to call her mother "mum", and always called her "Grace" instead. She also tells her mother that she does not like living where she does, and wants to go home.

Grace is not sure what to do about the way Sylvie has been behaving. She takes her to a therapist who tends to blame the behaviour on her lifestyle. One day while Sylvie is flipping through a magazine, she becomes fixated on a photo of an Irish fishing village called Coldharbour. Her response to the picture is :

"It's my seaside....I lived there...I lived in a little house, a white house....I had a cave and a dragon".

Is it possible Sylvie lived in a past life? Grace and Sylvie are invited by Adam, a university professor involved in the paranormal , to go to Ireland on a research grant, and see whether there is any merit to what Sylvie has been saying.

Part, mystery, part Gothic tale, Yes, My Darling Daughter, had me anxiously turning pages to find out how it would all end. Although things got wrapped up, just a little too neatly, I still really enjoyed this book. I loved that it really held my interest, and that I was able to read it in one day.

RECOMMENDED.

12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Don't Waste Your Time, July 5, 2009

By 

Kimberly A. Cook (Texas) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Yes, My Darling Daughter: A Novel (Hardcover)

Now that I've finished this book, all I feel is aggravated that I wasted time on it. I got it from Oprah's Book Club recommendations, which I'm usually very pleased with. And note, I'm a very open-minded reader. I go into all books thinking I'll learn something, love it, or both. I read all kinds of fictions and non-fictions.

This book was amature. The writing was mediocre. The author tried to jazz it up with some unneccessary eroticism, which, frankly, was just weird. The whole book basically said the same thing over and over.

The end, where you think you'll finally get the pay-off for suffering though this ridiculous book, is a disappointment (at best). The wrap-up, the solving of the mystery is.. stupid, almost.

I can't believe Oprah recommended this book. I can't believe it has 4 and 5 star ratings. Trust me, unless you're 12-year-old Sci-fi fanatic, you won't like this book.

14 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "I died Grace, I died in the water", April 14, 2009

By 

Michael Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Yes, My Darling Daughter: A Novel (Hardcover)

Margaret Leroy delves into a fascinating subject this novel, that of past lives and how a delicate four-year-old girl is life is irrevocably affected by an event that happened over a decade ago. Full of brittle and fragile detail, Leroy's gorgeous prose, captures the struggling angst of Grace Reynolds as she struggles to raise her four-year-old daughter Sylvie. Sylvie, an only child, enjoys the complete attention of Grace, her father Dominic unwilling to acknowledge her, more concerned with his own family excluding both grace and Sylvie. At a party for Lennie, Sylvie's best friend, suddenly and unexpectedly, there's a commotion. Water is everywhere, a scrabble of boys near the bowl, and Sylvie screaming, and then Grace's sense of dread. While brittle body is wracked with tension, the reason for her outbursts, her sadness and crying and her fear is unexplainable at best, the sense that there's something about Sylvie that is utterly beyond Grace. More worrying is Sylvie's strange phobia of water and a house she draws over and over with a blue border and the doors and windows always just the same. And of course there's the perpetual nightmares even as she comes into Grace's room. The sounds of her sobbing tugging at her, hauling Grace up from the surface of her dreams, the thoughts of life with Dominic "constantly dancing in the margins of her mind."

Grace seems to be battered and buffeted on all fronts. As she goes home to her empty and cold flat in Highlands, she ekes out a living working in a flower shop only her boss Lavinia offers her kindness, an old hippy with her willow wands and patchwork scraps of fabric, who tells Grace that only she knows what's right for Sylvie. Even the staff at Sylvie's nursery, just can't control the little girl, the stern and a little distant Mrs. Pace-Barden constantly complaining to grace about Sylvie's the constant temper tantrums. This first part of this tale, in particular, perfectly captures, Grace's sense of restriction she had of walls that press in whichever way she turns, the surging of frustration and the sense of this life unfolding before her, this unraveling of everything she's tried to knit together: "The patching up and making do."

Grace is desperate for more information about Sylvie, the answers appearing in a newspaper article, with stories of ghosts and that of Dr. Adam Winters, who investigates psychic phenomenon and who is in turn haunted by the accident that caused the death of his brother. As Grace finally recounts a sad confession to Adam : "it's like Sylvie's slipping away from me. It's like she doesn't see me or recognize me," both Grace and Adam travel to the small seaside Irish village of Coldharbour looking for answers, a hint of meaning, Adam wanting to find a way of living with his brother's death while Grace searches for answers. Leroy plunges us into her sad, haunting, and melancholy tale that moves from the dark days of London with the raw, searching wind, its smells of smoke and petrol fumes to Coldharbour, the lobster boats, the salt wind and the jetty, the sense of space. Grace pours out her bent-up frustrations, and Sylvie her accumulated emotions, in language so evocative that so much air, all the vastness of the place, the sky, the sea is almost corporeal. While Sylvie constantly seems to be eluding Grace, it is her almost spiritual connection to Alice Murphy and her daughter Jessica who suddenly disappeared, that tie the threads of this plot together along the painful acknowledgement that we are all mortal beings, that life is incomplete and where so much never gets said, so much left unfinished and broken. Mike Leonard April 08.