Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"[A] dazzling second novel....Riveting and engrossing, Meloy's tale of a family struggling with guilt and forgiveness spans decades and crosses continents, proving her status as one of the best literary observers of contemporary American life." Booklist (Starred Review)
Review
"A thoroughly original, undeniably brilliant companion piece to Liars and Saints. Each stands alone; together they pack a seismic wallop." Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
Review
"[A] big book as well as a swift, slender, graceful one. And if the speed and gloss of Ms. Meloy's first novel suggested that she might be better suited to short stories, this new book has the deep ramifications of more ambitious fiction." Janet Maslin, The New York Times
Review
"[Meloy] pads the sequel with soapy subplots and an ever-expanding web of random new characters....She may have rigged up a mighty clever postmodern game, but she's written a mediocre sudsy melodrama. (Grade: B-)" Entertainment Weekly
Review
"[A] seductive, absorbing read. With ease and fluidity, Meloy gracefully pirouettes from...narrative summary to slice-of-life vignettes that provide scope and immediacy. The tone is by turns wry, ironic, affectionate and consistently engaging." Philadelphia Inquirer
Review
"Meloy is stretching, intellectually and artistically, and watching her take risks is often a pleasure. A Family Daughter is not always consistent and not always convincing, but it is ambitious and playful and clever. That's a fair enough literary bargain for any novel." Washington Post
Review
"While some characters get a little too much time on the page...one senses that once Meloy harnesses the focus that has made her such a brilliant short-story writer, she will be just as brilliant a novelist." San Francisco Chronicle
Review
"The true miracle of A Family Daughter is that it successfully borrows metafictional technique...to tell a straightforward humanist story." Portland Oregonian
Review
"Meloy is observant, cogent and a pitiless profiler of how entwined yet estranged blood relations can be. In short chapters and crisp, exacting prose, she keeps tab on parallel fates." Seattle Times
Review
"Sex, bad behavior and a family that always comes together in the end." Cleveland Plain Dealer
About the Author
Maile Meloy is the author of the story collection Half in Love and the novel Liars and Saints, which was shortlisted for the 2005 Orange Prize. Meloy's 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.