A Family Daughter: Summary and book reviews of A Family Daughter by Maile Meloy, plus links to an excerpt from A Family Daughter and a biography of Maile Meloy.
A Family Daughter
by Maile Meloy
Hardcover: Feb 2006,
336 pages.
Paperback: Feb 2007,
336 pages.
From the award-winning author of Half in Love and
Liars and Saints, a riveting story of love, sex, secrets, guilt, and
forgiveness.
Maile Meloy's debut novel, Liars and Saints, captured the hearts of
readers and critics alike. Now Meloy returns with a novel even more dazzling
and unexpected than her first. Brilliantly entertaining, A Family
Daughter might also be the most insightful novel about families and love
that you will read this year.
It's 1979, and seven-year-old Abby, the youngest member of the close-knit
Santerre family, is trapped indoors with the chicken pox during a heat wave.
The events set in motion that summer will span decades and continents,
change the Santerres forever, and surprise and amaze anyone who loved
Meloy's Liars and Saints.
A rich, full novel about passion and desire, fear and betrayal, A Family
Daughter illuminates both the joys and complications of contemporary
life, and the relationship between truth and fiction. For everyone who has
yet to meet the Santerres, an unmatched pleasure awaits.
A Family Daughter isn't so much a sequel to Meloy's debut novel, Liars and Saints, as it is a parallel story. In Liars and Saints Meloy told the story of four generations of the Santerre family from World War II to the present. In A Family Daughter we meet the same family but from a different perspective .... Meloy juxtaposes the 'fictional' Liars and Saints with the 'real' A Family Daughter to tell a story that stands alone in either book but, when combined together packs "a seismic wallop". (Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
The Boston Globe
[Meloy] may be the first great American realist of the twenty-first century....The Santerres aren't real but they feel like they are, and the reader will not soon forget them.
Los Angeles Times
Meloy's Santerres may just be the most fascinating, engrossing American family since the Louds. BookBrowse note: In 1973 PBS made a 12-part documentary about a Californian family - The Louds. The documentary is considered by many to be the originator of reality TV and opened the door for future shows portraying dysfunctional families.
The New York Times Book Review
Upends popular notions of American fiction...A spectacular first novel.
Kirkus
Each novel stands alone; together they pack a seismic wallop.
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. 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.
Library Journal - Reba Leiding
This new work is enjoyable on its own, but those who have read Meloy's earlier effort can puzzle whether this book is a sequel or a revision. Highly recommended for popular fiction collections.
Booklist - Emily Cook
Riveting and engrossing, Meloy's tale of a family struggling with guilt and forgiveness spans decades and crosses continents, proving her status as one of the best literary observers of contemporary American life.
About the author: Maile Meloy is the
author of the story collection Half in Love
and the novels Liars and Saints and A
Family Daughter,. Her 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.
About Meloy's first novel,
Liars and Saints: "This first novel
packs quite a punch. In less than 300 pages
Maile Meloy paints a picture of 50 years in the
life of one Californian family from World War II
to the present. It seemed to me that the less
words she used to describe a scene, or the
feelings of a character, the more vividly I was
able to relate to that person or situation. It
takes great skill to hone one's words to this
degree!" - BookBrowse's...
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A compelling story of love and loss in a western Pennsylvania mining town in the years after World War II.
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