Synopses & Reviews
Review
"A lush song of a book that understands the intertwined beauty and fear of motherhood and daughterhood." Caitlin Horrocks, author of This is Not Your City
Review
"Brimming with sad, delicious folklore and echoing with the voices of five generations of mothers and daughters in a family shaped by music as much as by tragedy, Celt's debut is enchanting." Sarah Cornwell, author of What I Had Before I Had You
Review
"There is so much to applaud in --its love song to the world of opera, its masterful retelling of ancient Polish fables, and, above all, its examination of the complexity of modern love, in all its varieties. Readers will be enchanted by this astonishing novel that shifts seamlessly between past and present--from a soprano's precociously musical childhood to her experience as a new mother who, recovering from the trauma of birth and loss of her beloved grandmother, has lost her most cherished gift, her voice." Julia Fierro , author of Cutting Teeth
Review
"A story libretto that commands attention from the opening scene. Celt has crafted a modern fairy tale that had me up from my chair in standing ovation." Sarah McCoy, New York Times and international best-selling author of The Mapmaker's Children
Review
"Gorgeous. is lush and dreamy and strange, and it will make you feel like a beautiful witch has put you under a sinister spell." Katie Coyle, author of Vivian Apple at the End of the World
Review
"[A] dazzling debut... is about motherhood and daughterhood, of course, but also relationships and fidelity and music and ambition and talent and compromise and scary-ass Polish folktale witchery." Rachel Fershleiser
Review
"Music and motherhood--that's what you'll find at the core of , yet each element is so original, you'll swear you've never read about either before. This debut by Adrienne Celt reads like a warm, cherished folksong. " Bustle.com (Summer Reading Roundup)
Review
"A haunting novel with real emotional depth, Celt's psychologically nuanced debut continues to resonate long after the last page has been turned." Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
Review
"After the birth of her daughter, opera sensation Lulu fears a family curse has made her lose her voice, in Celt's lyrical debut novel about the perplexing riddle of inheritance." Sarah Meyer
Review
"Celt's family saga--steeped in folklore and vibrating with music--is as much about the power of storytelling as the fraught relationships between mothers and daughters.... A haunting novel with real emotional depth, Celt's psychologically nuanced debut continues to resonate long after the last page has been turned." O Magazine
Synopsis
In this virtuosic debut, a world-class soprano seeks to reclaim her voice from the curse that winds through her family tree.
Synopsis
Lulu can't sing. Since the traumatic birth of her daughter, the internationally renowned soprano hasn't dared utter a note. She's afraid that her body is too fragile and that she may have lost her talent to a long-dreaded curse afflicting all of the mothers in her family.
When Lulu was a child, her strong-willed grandmother Ada filled her head with fables of the family's enchanted history in the Polish countryside. A fantastical lore took hold an incantatory mix of young love, desperate hope, and one sinister bargain that altered the family's history forever. Since that fateful pact, Ada tells Lulu, each mother in their family has been given a daughter, but each daughter has exacted an essential cost from her mother.
Ada was the first to recognize young Lulu's transcendent talent, spotting it early on in their cramped Chicago apartment, then watching her granddaughter ascend to dizzying heights in packed international concert halls. But as the curse predicted, Lulu's mother, a sultry and elusive jazz singer, disappeared into her bitterness in the face of Lulu's superior talent before disappearing from her family's life altogether. Now, in the early days of her own daughter's life, Lulu now finds herself weighing her overwhelming love for her child against the burden of her family's past.
In incandescent prose, debut novelist Adrienne Celt skillfully intertwines the sensuous but precise physicality of both motherhood and music. She infuses The Daughters with the spirit of the rusalka, a bewitching figure of Polish mythology that inspired Dvo ak's classic opera. The result is a tapestry of secrets, affairs, and unimaginable sacrifices, revealing a family legacy laced with brilliance, tragedy, and most mysterious and seductive of all the resonant ancestral lore that binds each mother to the one that came before.
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About the Author
Adrienne Celt's work has been published in Esquire, the Kenyon Review, the Rumpus, and elsewhere, and she holds an MFA from Arizona State University. She lives in Tucson, and she has a Polish grandmother of her own.