Yes, My Darling Daughter [Paperback]

Margaret Leroy delves into a fascinating subject this novel, that of past lives and how a delicate four-year-old girl is life is irrevocably affected by an event that happened over a decade ago. Full of brittle and fragile detail, Leroy's gorgeous prose, captures the struggling angst of Grace Reynolds as she struggles to raise her four-year-old daughter Sylvie. Sylvie, an only child, enjoys the complete attention of Grace, her father Dominic unwilling to acknowledge her, more concerned with his own family excluding both grace and Sylvie. At a party for Lennie, Sylvie's best friend, suddenly and unexpectedly, there's a commotion. Water is everywhere, a scrabble of boys near the bowl, and Sylvie screaming, and then Grace's sense of dread. While brittle body is wracked with tension, the reason for her outbursts, her sadness and crying and her fear is unexplainable at best, the sense that there's something about Sylvie that is utterly beyond Grace. More worrying is Sylvie's strange phobia of water and a house she draws over and over with a blue border and the doors and windows always just the same. And of course there's the perpetual nightmares even as she comes into Grace's room. The sounds of her sobbing tugging at her, hauling Grace up from the surface of her dreams, the thoughts of life with Dominic "constantly dancing in the margins of her mind."

Grace seems to be battered and buffeted on all fronts. As she goes home to her empty and cold flat in Highlands, she ekes out a living working in a flower shop only her boss Lavinia offers her kindness, an old hippy with her willow wands and patchwork scraps of fabric, who tells Grace that only she knows what's right for Sylvie. Even the staff at Sylvie's nursery, just can't control the little girl, the stern and a little distant Mrs. Pace-Barden constantly complaining to grace about Sylvie's the constant temper tantrums. This first part of this tale, in particular, perfectly captures, Grace's sense of restriction she had of walls that press in whichever way she turns, the surging of frustration and the sense of this life unfolding before her, this unraveling of everything she's tried to knit together: "The patching up and making do."

Grace is desperate for more information about Sylvie, the answers appearing in a newspaper article, with stories of ghosts and that of Dr. Adam Winters, who investigates psychic phenomenon and who is in turn haunted by the accident that caused the death of his brother. As Grace finally recounts a sad confession to Adam : "it's like Sylvie's slipping away from me. It's like she doesn't see me or recognize me," both Grace and Adam travel to the small seaside Irish village of Coldharbour looking for answers, a hint of meaning, Adam wanting to find a way of living with his brother's death while Grace searches for answers. Leroy plunges us into her sad, haunting, and melancholy tale that moves from the dark days of London with the raw, searching wind, its smells of smoke and petrol fumes to Coldharbour, the lobster boats, the salt wind and the jetty, the sense of space. Grace pours out her bent-up frustrations, and Sylvie her accumulated emotions, in language so evocative that so much air, all the vastness of the place, the sky, the sea is almost corporeal. While Sylvie constantly seems to be eluding Grace, it is her almost spiritual connection to Alice Murphy and her daughter Jessica who suddenly disappeared, that tie the threads of this plot together along the painful acknowledgement that we are all mortal beings, that life is incomplete and where so much never gets said, so much left unfinished and broken. Mike Leonard April 08.

i love this book but was very disappointed that i had already read it under a different title, the drowning girl. i would have sent it back but it would have cost as much with postage etc. i wasted my money and think it should be stated when a book is publised under 2 titles.

Seldom have I read a book that annoyed me more... The disturbed 3-year-old girl's behaviour is so erratic that it's very clear from early on that something bad had happened to hear ... in a previous life. But, frankly, halfway through the book I just didn't care anymore. I was annoyed with the girl just as much as with her saintly mother who seemed to have an unending capacity to put up with the most obnoxious behaviour. Is there a happy ending? I don't know and I don't want to know.