Now you can browse new titles by year.

BookBrowse Reviews A Family Daughter by Maile Meloy

Summary |  Excerpt |  Reading Guide |  Reviews |  Beyond the book |  Read-Alikes |  Genres & Themes |  Author Bio

A Family Daughter by Maile Meloy

A Family Daughter

by Maile Meloy
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus:
  • First Published:
  • Feb 1, 2006, 336 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Feb 2007, 336 pages
  • Rate this book

  • Buy This Book

About This Book

Reviews

BookBrowse:


A riveting story of love, sex, secrets, guilt, and forgiveness, by the author of Liars and Saints - Novel

From the book jacket: 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.

Comment: 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 people but from a different perspective. At the center of this tale is Abby, the granddaughter of Yvette and Teddy Senterre who we first meet in 1973 when she is 7-years-old. Following the many twists and turns of her young life (which I won't reveal to avoid spoiling the plot) she publishes a highly autobiographical novel, Liars and Saints. 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 (in the words of Kirkus Reviews) "a seismic wallop".

"Meloy's Santerres may just be the most fascinating, engrossing American family since the Louds." - The Los Angeles Times.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in February 2006, and has been updated for the February 2007 edition. Click here to go to this issue.

This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access become a member today.
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

If you liked A Family Daughter, try these:

  • The Blue Star jacket

    The Blue Star

    by Tony Earley

    Published 2009

    About This book

    More by this author

    Jim Glass has fallen in love with his classmate Chrissie Steppe. Unfortunately, Chrissie is Bucky Bucklaw's girlfriend, and Bucky has joined the navy on the eve of war. Jim vows to win Chrissie's heart in his absence, but the war makes high school less than a safe haven and gives a young man's emotions a grown man's gravity.

  • The Pirate's Daughter jacket

    The Pirate's Daughter

    by Margaret Cezair-Thompson

    Published 2008

    About This book

    More by this author

    In 1946, a storm-wrecked boat carrying Hollywood’s most famous swashbuckler shored up on the coast of Jamaica, and the glamorous world of 1940’s Hollywood converged with that of a small West Indian society.

We have 8 read-alikes for A Family Daughter, but non-members are limited to two results. To see the complete list of this book's read-alikes, you need to be a member.
More books by Maile Meloy
Search read-alikes
How we choose read-alikes

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: The Schubert Treatment
    The Schubert Treatment
    by Claire Oppert
    Claire Oppert fell in love with music at an early age and trained to make a career as a classical ...
  • Book Jacket
    Murder by Degrees
    by Ritu Mukerji
    Lydia Weston is among the first wave of female physicians and professors in the United States. ...
  • Book Jacket: Women's Hotel
    Women's Hotel
    by Daniel M. Lavery
    In the 1920s–1960s, the Barbizon Hotel for Women was a residential hotel where respectable ...
  • Book Jacket: Intermezzo
    Intermezzo
    by Sally Rooney
    In 2022, Sally Rooney delivered a lecture that later ran in The Paris Review, in which she stated ...

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Libby Lost and Found
    by Stephanie Booth

    Libby Lost and Found is a book for people who don't know who they are without the books they love.

Who Said...

Second hand books are wild books...

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

H I O the G

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.