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vwojtowicz's review
dark
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
4.0
jdukuray's review against another edition
2.0
I actually gave up on this half way through. I thought that it was a sequel to Meloy’s previous novel, Liars and Saints, which I enjoyed. But I was disappointed to discover that, rather than a normal sequel, A Family Daughter takes some of the same characters, adds some new ones, some of whom have the same names as characters from the earlier novel, shuffles them, keeping some details and relations, completely changing others, and retells the story. I will grant that Meloy is clever and a good writer, but this manœuvre does not pass the « what for? » test and actually ruined the first book for me. It had the effect of invalidating the earlier story and my attachment to the first-version characters. As another reviewer wrote, the second story is very « meta » (I think it may be that one character turns out to have written the first book about her family), but I lost the will to follow this convoluted path. Neither the writing nor the story seem hefty enough or deep enough to support the authorial shenanigans.
sensible_reader's review
4.0
I found this sequal to Liars and Saints to be fresh and stimulating. It has a very rapid pace. I look forwad to reading another book by Maile Meloy.
ramonamead's review against another edition
3.0
It took me a while to wrap my brain around this novel. I recently read Liars & Saints, which I absolutely loved. A Family Daughter is not a sequel or even quite a follow up to the first novel. It features the same characters, however it's a totally different timeline. The themes are all there: Catholicism, family secrets, guilt, lies, family obligation, and it's the same family, same characters, only in different circumstances. It's a beautiful novel and the writing is engrossing, but my enjoyment of it was affected because I was distracted by comparing this story to the previous novel.
meglandry's review against another edition
3.0
I could have done without the graphic sexual content, but overall it was a good read- who doesn't love a good family drama?
moreadsbooks's review
2.0
This book was hard to get into. It shares the same characters as Liars & Saints but they're not drawn with as much depth here. This book felt shallow & kind of forced.
reallifereading's review
3.0
I picked it up on a whim, having read Maile Meloy's other book, and remembering having liked it. But this, I'm not too sure about. It was like watching a soap opera, not that I've watched many, but the drama of it all. The many layers, the characters, the way each chapter seemed to be quite self-contained. It was interesting enough that I finished reading it, but I will remember it next month? Probably not.
debnanceatreaderbuzz's review
4.0
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.
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.
tachyondecay's review
2.0
Once upon a time I sat down to read a book called Liars and Saints, which I had noticed in a piece in TIME magazine. I had bought the book with the intent of giving it as a gift, but after reading it I thought better: although not completely terrible, Liars and Saints possessed nothing to recommend it, inhabiting that wasteland of contrived implausibilities that seems to be the home of so much literary fiction. Generations pass in a matter of pages, sex is had, and babies get made. It was rather standard, rather bland fare for that type of novel.
Apparently I am a robot who merely follows his to-read list unquestioningly: A Family Daughter was on the list; it was available at my library; I borrowed it. I didn’t look at the description, so it wasn’t until I started reading and saw the names “Abby” and “Yvette”. Those sounded vaguely familiar—was this a sequel? A prequel? What had I gotten myself into?
It turns out A Family Daughter is related to Maile Meloy’s previous novel, but not in the conventional sense. Instead, it swallows the universe of Liars and Saint, which turns out to be a somewhat-fictional family history as written by this book’s version of Abby Collins! This is very meta, and normally I love metafiction. Maybe it’s a holdover from my days of high school drama class and a perverse fascination with breaking the fourth wall; certainly I like when authors self-deprecatingly portray themselves or their own work in the story. However, the simple metafictional nature of A Family Daughter is nowhere near intriguing enough to save it from its numerous flaws.
I got out the sticky notes around page 6. I don’t ordinarily take notes while reading, resorting to a sticky only when I need to ensure I can find a specific page—usually for a quotation. Sometimes I use stickies while reading non-fiction, in order to remind myself of points I want to address in my review. When I break out the stickies en masse for fiction, it’s usually a bad sign: I’m not just going to criticize this book; I’m going to itemize my criticism.
The sticky on page 6 reads, “One-line descriptions” and was prompted by this passage:
I don’t want to make too much of this, because all writers make choices, and sometimes the best choice is the most expedient one. And I admit that my recollection of Liars and Saints did not leave me favourably disposed to this book. However, I still balk when I read the above passage, not because it’s particularly bad writing, but because it just seems to pigeonhole this book as “literary” more than any genre snobbery on my part could. Through these pithy and simplistic descriptions, Meloy reminds us that we don’t really need to pay attention to these characters, because they are all just stereotypes and caricatures. In general, the characters in this book are either flat and unremarkable—like Peter, the TA and Abby’s sometime love interest—or completely unbelievable—like Saffron, Katya, et al. Teddy, the Santerre family patriarch, is a textbook case of the crotchety old man:
(I swear it wasn’t just because of that last line that I chose to highlight this passage, although it does make the technophile in me cringe.) I think Meloy is trying to be funny here, or at least cute, with such turns of phrase as “somebody’s grandson”. Alas, it falls flat, because it might be entertaining, but it does nothing to deepen Teddy’s character. Throughout the book, he is this one-note instrument: he’s disappointed with his son for never making anything of his life; he’s chronically unable to perceive Clarissa’s flirtation with lesbianism; he has, in general, checked out of much of family life because of his aging senses.
I’ll say this for Liars and Saints: at least the stories of more of its characters were accessible. A Family Daughter follows mostly Abby and Jamie, with brief but unsatisfying detours toward Clarissa and a therapist (more on her later). We get a glimpse at Teddy’s backstory, and a little more from Yvette, but that’s about it. This is not the multigenerational story that Liars and Saints aspired to be—and that would be fine, if it stood alone. Since it seems to inhabit a parallel universe, I feel adrift: how much do I really know about this Teddy? How much can I assume is the same as what I learned about him in Liars and Saints? There are all these echoes in my mind, and I’m not sure what’s real.
I kind of like the therapist character, if only because it’s so rare for a book with characters in therapy to show us the other side of the table, so to speak. Meloy writes, “Leila Tirrett was a psychologist with a Ph.D. and problems of her own”, and aside from attempting to sound ironic, I like that she humanizes the character this way. Suddenly she’s no longer just a third party who listens to Abby’s problems and confessions: she’s a real person, with her own issues, and Abby is just the latest patient in her life.
Small moments like the one above prevent me from condemning A Family Daughter completely. Like Liars and Saints, it is not so much terrible as just unremarkable. That might sound weird, considering that this book is full of improbable events. There’s a Romanian orphan who turns out to be the son of a Hungarian prostitute—who wants him back. Jamie ends up marrying the mother and adopting the orphan, and they move from Argentina to the United States to attempt a happily ever after ending (I will let you guess how that works for them). There’s a reason that we say truth is often stranger than fiction, for we tend to require our fiction be realistic, that events flow logically from their cause. When they don’t, it becomes absurd. Mixing absurdism with attempts to create powerful dramas is a dangerous business. Adept authors can come up with something akin to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but most of the time, you get something more along the lines of The Hitman Diaries. I know where A Family Daughter lies along this spectrum.
I would like to think that Meloy is attempting something clever and, yes, risky. Her metafictional novel-within-the-novel, while not entirely novel to me, is still an intriguing premise that should have gone a long way to making me enjoy this book. Unfortunately, the plot and characters themselves are just so literary in the most pretentious sense of that term; their problems are larger than life. I don’t want to sound like I’m coming down on all literary fiction everywhere. However, this book demonstrates some of the common flaws in literary fiction that will make me harder on a book of its ilk. Nobody ever stops having sex. Nobody ever says, “Gee, I could avoid this drama if I just talk to someone.” To her credit, Meloy keeps the drama below “hysterical” levels, and so A Family Daughter feels only contrived, not truly absurd. Much with Liars and Saints, this is a bland novel whose structure is intriguing but whose semiotics remain insufferable.
Apparently I am a robot who merely follows his to-read list unquestioningly: A Family Daughter was on the list; it was available at my library; I borrowed it. I didn’t look at the description, so it wasn’t until I started reading and saw the names “Abby” and “Yvette”. Those sounded vaguely familiar—was this a sequel? A prequel? What had I gotten myself into?
It turns out A Family Daughter is related to Maile Meloy’s previous novel, but not in the conventional sense. Instead, it swallows the universe of Liars and Saint, which turns out to be a somewhat-fictional family history as written by this book’s version of Abby Collins! This is very meta, and normally I love metafiction. Maybe it’s a holdover from my days of high school drama class and a perverse fascination with breaking the fourth wall; certainly I like when authors self-deprecatingly portray themselves or their own work in the story. However, the simple metafictional nature of A Family Daughter is nowhere near intriguing enough to save it from its numerous flaws.
I got out the sticky notes around page 6. I don’t ordinarily take notes while reading, resorting to a sticky only when I need to ensure I can find a specific page—usually for a quotation. Sometimes I use stickies while reading non-fiction, in order to remind myself of points I want to address in my review. When I break out the stickies en masse for fiction, it’s usually a bad sign: I’m not just going to criticize this book; I’m going to itemize my criticism.
The sticky on page 6 reads, “One-line descriptions” and was prompted by this passage:
Yvette stood at the kitchen counter wondering what part of her daughter’s selfishness was her fault. Had she not given Clarissa enough attention when she was Abby’s age? Had her other children distracted her—Margot, who was older and perfect, and Jamie, who was younger and troubled?
I don’t want to make too much of this, because all writers make choices, and sometimes the best choice is the most expedient one. And I admit that my recollection of Liars and Saints did not leave me favourably disposed to this book. However, I still balk when I read the above passage, not because it’s particularly bad writing, but because it just seems to pigeonhole this book as “literary” more than any genre snobbery on my part could. Through these pithy and simplistic descriptions, Meloy reminds us that we don’t really need to pay attention to these characters, because they are all just stereotypes and caricatures. In general, the characters in this book are either flat and unremarkable—like Peter, the TA and Abby’s sometime love interest—or completely unbelievable—like Saffron, Katya, et al. Teddy, the Santerre family patriarch, is a textbook case of the crotchety old man:
The receptionist had a nice voice, and dark hair. Teddy made an appointment on a computer screen to have somebody’s grandson put a sonic probe into his eyes and then suck out the lens and put in a folded-up new one, and he gave the pretty woman Yvette’s e-mail address. He had begun life, he reflected, with the radio, the telegraph, and the Victrola, and he had been perfectly happy with those.
(I swear it wasn’t just because of that last line that I chose to highlight this passage, although it does make the technophile in me cringe.) I think Meloy is trying to be funny here, or at least cute, with such turns of phrase as “somebody’s grandson”. Alas, it falls flat, because it might be entertaining, but it does nothing to deepen Teddy’s character. Throughout the book, he is this one-note instrument: he’s disappointed with his son for never making anything of his life; he’s chronically unable to perceive Clarissa’s flirtation with lesbianism; he has, in general, checked out of much of family life because of his aging senses.
I’ll say this for Liars and Saints: at least the stories of more of its characters were accessible. A Family Daughter follows mostly Abby and Jamie, with brief but unsatisfying detours toward Clarissa and a therapist (more on her later). We get a glimpse at Teddy’s backstory, and a little more from Yvette, but that’s about it. This is not the multigenerational story that Liars and Saints aspired to be—and that would be fine, if it stood alone. Since it seems to inhabit a parallel universe, I feel adrift: how much do I really know about this Teddy? How much can I assume is the same as what I learned about him in Liars and Saints? There are all these echoes in my mind, and I’m not sure what’s real.
I kind of like the therapist character, if only because it’s so rare for a book with characters in therapy to show us the other side of the table, so to speak. Meloy writes, “Leila Tirrett was a psychologist with a Ph.D. and problems of her own”, and aside from attempting to sound ironic, I like that she humanizes the character this way. Suddenly she’s no longer just a third party who listens to Abby’s problems and confessions: she’s a real person, with her own issues, and Abby is just the latest patient in her life.
Small moments like the one above prevent me from condemning A Family Daughter completely. Like Liars and Saints, it is not so much terrible as just unremarkable. That might sound weird, considering that this book is full of improbable events. There’s a Romanian orphan who turns out to be the son of a Hungarian prostitute—who wants him back. Jamie ends up marrying the mother and adopting the orphan, and they move from Argentina to the United States to attempt a happily ever after ending (I will let you guess how that works for them). There’s a reason that we say truth is often stranger than fiction, for we tend to require our fiction be realistic, that events flow logically from their cause. When they don’t, it becomes absurd. Mixing absurdism with attempts to create powerful dramas is a dangerous business. Adept authors can come up with something akin to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but most of the time, you get something more along the lines of The Hitman Diaries. I know where A Family Daughter lies along this spectrum.
I would like to think that Meloy is attempting something clever and, yes, risky. Her metafictional novel-within-the-novel, while not entirely novel to me, is still an intriguing premise that should have gone a long way to making me enjoy this book. Unfortunately, the plot and characters themselves are just so literary in the most pretentious sense of that term; their problems are larger than life. I don’t want to sound like I’m coming down on all literary fiction everywhere. However, this book demonstrates some of the common flaws in literary fiction that will make me harder on a book of its ilk. Nobody ever stops having sex. Nobody ever says, “Gee, I could avoid this drama if I just talk to someone.” To her credit, Meloy keeps the drama below “hysterical” levels, and so A Family Daughter feels only contrived, not truly absurd. Much with Liars and Saints, this is a bland novel whose structure is intriguing but whose semiotics remain insufferable.