Summary and Reviews of A Family Daughter by Maile Meloy

A Family Daughter by Maile Meloy

A Family Daughter

by Maile Meloy
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  • Critics' Consensus (8):
  • First Published:
  • Feb 1, 2006, 336 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Feb 2007, 336 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

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.

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Reviews

BookBrowse Review

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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

Full Review (322 words)

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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).

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Beyond the Book



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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