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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Feb 2006, 336 pages
Paperback:
Feb 2007, 336 pages
Book Reviewed by:
BookBrowse Review Team
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From the award-winning author of Half in Love and Liars and Saints, a riveting story of love, sex, secrets, guilt, and forgiveness.
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.
1
In the summer of 1979, just when Yvette Santerre thought her children
were all safely launched and out of the house, her granddaughter came to
stay in Hermosa Beach and came down with a fever, and then a rash.
Yvette thought it might be stress: Abby was seven, and her parents were
considering divorce, and she must have sensed trouble. At bedtime she
cried from homesickness, and Yvette asked if she wanted to go home. Abby
said, "I want to go home, and I want to stay here."
The rash got worse, and Yvette's husband said they should tell
Clarissa her daughter was sick. But Clarissa had gone back to Hawaii,
where she had lived in Navy housing before Abby was born. She said it
was the last place she had been happy, and she was staying somewhere
without a telephone. So Yvette called Abby's father, up in Northern
California.
"Oh...
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"...continued
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
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 ...
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