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Book Reviewed by: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.
If you liked A Family Daughter, try these:
by Tony Earley
Published 2009
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.
by Margaret Cezair-Thompson
Published 2008
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.
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