A Family Daughter

Another great book from Meloy. Her style is fabulous and captivating. I will buy every book she writes.

An uncle who sleeps with his niece, a mother who won't commit to her daughter, and a matriarch who looks back at her family and wonders why they are all so eccentric, wayward and willful. In A Family Daughter, author Maile Meloy returns to the Santerres family, telling her story from the perspective of Clarissa's daughter Abby who is about to attend university in San Diego. Beautiful, confused and sensual, Abby is also emotional and complicated. She visits a therapist to try and make sense of her life, and has a close relationship with Ben, her father. But when Ben is killed in a car accident, Abby is set adrift - her mother, Clarissa is too distant and self-involved to take that much of an interest in her. Shaken to the core, she falls in love with her Uncle Jamie, a supportive influence since she was seven years old. Of course, there's a question over whether Jamie is really Abby's uncle, but they're so hot for each other that they begin sleeping together. Abby also begins to write a novel about a Catholic family keeping secrets from each other. It's ostensibly a work of fiction, but it's also a thinly disguised veil of her own family, and it allows the major players to seek out part of their pasts, each attempting to find their own way. A Family Daughter is richly observed and multi-layered and it keeps constantly diverging, introducing characters existing in the periphery of the Santerres' lives; at one stage, the narrative even switches gears to Argentina. There's a spoilt countess, a devious Hungarian prostitute, and a calculating French lawyer, with Meloy always contrasting these points of view, exposing the miscommunications, disappointments and expectations of this family and the people that fall within their radar. Teddy, the patriarch, with his ailing eyesight and declining health wonders why his family make the kind of decisions they do and choose to live errant lives. An old style Catholic father, his beliefs made him rigid - he wonders why Jamie hadn't settled down the way he expected, and that his daughters lives were not what he wanted for them, "we all knew in all of these cases that he hoped that things would turn out differently," Teddy represents the old guard, wanting what is understandable and morally unambiguous and not filled with strife, "to trust Go and sow faith and Love." At the novel's end, none of the characters ever really achieve Teddy's wishes: Clarissa remains capricious and selfish, the bored Margot reconnects with an old flame and throws herself into an affair, handsome Jamie marries for convenience not love, and the lovely Abby remains baffled at her family's dysfunctions and contradictions. While A Family Daughter isn't as tightly plotted and as realistic as its prequel Liars and Saints, the novel is still an unusual examination of a modern American family in crisis, "a crazy invented family." The problem with a second novel is that it must prolong the curiosity of the first, move the story along a

Half the considerable charm of Family Daughter is the fact that Meloy revisits her earlier work, Liars and Saints, and deftly twists the plot points and characters, creating a brand new dish with the same ingredients. Family Daughter realizes the potential that Meloy first displayed in Liars and Saints, a book that left me reeling, sort of like flipping through a photo album on warp speed. (In the space of a few pages, Clarissa is pregnant with Abby, Abby is born, grows up, and dies.) The characters blurred together in the finest soap opera fashion, and getting to the end of the book felt like winning a race: I'd covered a lot of ground but if there were roses to stop and smell, I hadn't glimpsed them. So I appreciated Meloy's willingness to reintroduce us to Abby and to give us a chance to get to know this complicated, often confused, but ultimately insightful protagonist. Not only that, Meloy relaxes enough to have fun, introducing eccentric charmers such as the deliciously-named Saffron and devilish Uncle Freddie. Having skimmed the other reviews, I can't sign off without addressing the negative comments I saw. First, you want serious literature? Please, help yourself, put this book down and dust off the Tolstoy or Proust. Daughter was not written to be the foundation of your Ph.D. dissertation. Next, the whines about the lack of congruency between Liars and Daughter. From my perspective, one of the coolest aspects of Daughter is that whole parallel universe thing. After Abby publishes her family novel, the reader is left wondering whether Abby's novel was actually Liars and Saints--there are hints that many of the key elements of Liars, notably the "who's your mama" mystery/scandal, were concocted by the family daughter. But if you spend too much time trying to figure out the chicken-and-egg relationship here, you may risk undermining your enjoyment of the book. Bottom line: as refreshing as a lime spritzer and perfect for the beach. Meloy's found her pace with this one, and (as long as you try not to get too nitpicky) you will not regret the hours you spend with Abby and family.

I was fortunate enough to be given this book just as I got on a plane to cross the country. I read half of it going west and finished it coming home. Just terrific. Great writing, great voice, amazing characters, funny dialogue. It's that perfect blend of humor and serious that all writers strive for--more than that, it takes that step beyond "literary novel" by being so readable. This has caused people to criticize it for being "soap opery" but that's the best part. The great read you don't feel guilty about! I'd say it's the best book so far of 2006--and here's the funny part. It's considered a "sequel" to her first novel and I haven't even read it yet. So don't worry if you haven't, just get this one and enjoy it. Meanwhile, I'm out to get Liars and Saints.

The story of the Santerres is continued from LIARS AND SAINTS in this tale told from the point of view of several of the characters. When Abby is seven, her mother and father are separating. Abby stays with her grandparents, developing chicken pox and a close relationship with her college-aged uncle Jamie, who comes home to entertain and delight his niece. After the divorce, Abby lives in a joint custody arrangement --- a month with her warm but strict lawyer father alternating with a month with her free-spirit mother and her mother's multitude of boyfriends. Abby grows up and decides to go to college at the University of San Diego, maybe partially because that's where her parents met, were happy together, and conceived her. Tragedy strikes the family and Abby falls apart. She leaves school, cannot eat, and refuses to be consoled. She takes off on her own, and is far too alone until Uncle Jamie comes to help her, once again rescuing her from a dreary stretch. In the midst of a startling new twist in their relationship, Jamie learns a potentially devastating (if true) family secret, which he's afraid to confirm. Meanwhile, Abby becomes fascinated by what lies beneath the surface of family connections. She begins a novel based on her own family, embellished with her imagination. Jamie becomes besotted with and then engaged to odd, beautiful, chronically unfaithful Saffron. Saffron asks him to come with her to Argentina to help with a family disaster of her own: her mother, Josephine, who has recently adopted a baby, now has been stricken with dementia. Jamie and Saffron request Abby's company on the trip to translate for the child who speaks only Spanish. In Argentina, settled into the gothic atmosphere of Josephine's mansion, their situations change rapidly. There is a death, a potential blackmailer, and a questionable will. Out of the chaos, an unexpected family unit is formed. Abby finishes her novel; following its publication, her family is concerned over the facts and fictions contained in her book. Amazingly, some of the most astonishing true events in the story are regarded as pure fiction and vice versa. In real life, family members are galvanized to surprising actions by memories triggered by Abby's book. From the moment I opened A FAMILY DAUGHTER, I was completely absorbed in Abby's life and would happily have read it in one sitting if Real Life hadn't kept interfering. The characters are entirely believable. It is a fascinating look into extended connections and repercussions of actions among family, friends and lovers. Without being one bit overwrought (in fact, the prose is nicely understated), this book is crammed full of drama: deaths, depression, infidelity, drugs, secrets and lies, illicit affairs, madness, obsession, mysterious strangers, love of all kinds, an inheritance, adoptions, and more. The author has a unique gift for unforeseen yet reasonable plot twists that makes for delightfully unpredictable reading. Although th