Review
"A fascinating story, one I won't soon forget. I was captivated. In my opinion, a must read!"
-- Lisa D'Angelo -- Book Review Cafe. April, 2002
"A fascinating story, one I won't soon forget. I was captivated. In my opinion, a must read!" -- BookReviewCafe.com. April, 2002
"Daddy's Girls," a bittersweet novel of love, redemption and spirit in a dysfunctional family won a Gold Medal for Fiction. -- ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Awards 2001 Gold Medal for Fiction
"Fascinating, frightening, yet very funny. Powerful new way of looking at society, families, women, death, life, hope and especially madness." -- Fran Gillespie, MentalHelp.Net, October, 2001
"The best book I've read since 'The Hours' by Michael Cunningham" (Pulitzer Prize Winner for Fiction, 2000) --Terry Mathews -- Midwest Book Review, May, 2001
"Written from the heart with the deep understanding, good storytelling, and a new dimension suggesting possibilities beyond the norm." -- Nelson (BC) Daily News, July, 2001, by Anne DeGrace
Written from the heart with the deep understanding, good storytelling, and a new dimension suggesting possibilities beyond the norm." -- Anne DeGrace, Nelson (BC) Daily News, July, 2001
Product Description
Daddy’s Girls is a rich yet simple tale of love, redemption and spirit, told by the three women in a dysfunctional family. Their overlapping vignettes create a vivid patchwork of life’s defining moments to reveal the dark forces lurking beneath the typical middle-class veneer as they struggle to love one another.
The characters, a mother and her two daughters, each narrate in their own words and thoughts. Ruth Krazny is living a life she never wanted, suffering marriage and children as the only way to get her parents’ approval and support. Doing her best as a wife and mother, she plays her role by rote, her heart longing for the life she abandoned when her parents forbid her to go on the road as the singer in a band.
Her daughters, Allison and Cherie, not feeling the love or acceptance they so desperately want from their mother nor the attention they crave from their father, develop into two very different but equally distorted personalities. Allison becomes the "good girl," intelligent, studious and introverted, protecting herself by not making waves. Cherie develops into the "bad girl," aggressive and unruly, talking back, hitting back running away from home, doing drugs, having indiscriminate sex and finally going crazy. Amidst the domestic chaos is the father who works hard but doesn’t know what to do about all the pandemonium around him, so he withdraws, not realizing how strong an influence he is.
From the characters’ earliest lives into adulthood, death and beyond, the book explores the origins of mental illness, and the challenge of learning the lessons it teaches.
