Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Apr 2007
240 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
Before A.M. Homes was born, she was put up for adoption. Her birth mother was a twenty-two- year-old single woman who was having an affair with a much older married man with children of his own. The Mistress’s Daughter is the story of what happened when, thirty years later, her birth parents came looking for her.
Homes, renowned for the psychological accuracy and emotional intensity of her storytelling, tells how her birth parents initially made contact with her and what happened afterward (her mother stalked her and appeared unannounced at a reading) and what she was able to reconstruct about the story of their lives and their families. Her birth mother, a complex and lonely woman, never married or had another child, and died of kidney failure in 1998; her birth father, who initially made overtures about inviting her into his family, never did.
"Novelist Homes's searing essay about meeting her biological parents 31 years after they gave her up for adoption forms the first half of this much-anticipated memoir, but the rest of the book doesn't match its visceral power." - PW.
"Starred Review. Homes masterfully distills angst and discovery into a riveting tale of nature and nurture that encompasses America's great patchwork of immigrants and secrets." - Booklist.
"Homes draws you in from the first sentence and holds your interest throughout, sharing her fear, disappointment, pathos, and bathos." - Library Journal.
"Ultimately off-putting and unappealing, due to a whiny, self-pitying attitude conveyed in overwrought prose. " - Kirkus.
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Homes is the author of novels such as This Book Will Save Your Life and Music for Torching.
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