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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
carrying her private sense of disaster , 21 April 2006
An uncle who sleeps with his niece, a mother who won't commit to her daughter, and a matriarch who looks back at her family and wonders why they are all so eccentric, wayward and willful. In A Family Daughter, author Maile Meloy returns to the Santerres family, telling her story from the perspective of Clarissa's daughter Abby who is about to attend university in San Diego.
Beautiful, confused and sensual, Abby is also emotional and complicated. She visits a therapist to try and make sense of her life, and has a close relationship with Ben, her father. But when Ben is killed in a car accident, Abby is set adrift - her mother, Clarissa is too distant and self-involved to take that much of an interest in her. Shaken to the core, she falls in love with her Uncle Jamie, a supportive influence since she was seven years old.
Of course, there's a question over whether Jamie is really Abby's uncle, but they're so hot for each other that they begin sleeping together. Abby also begins to write a novel about a Catholic family keeping secrets from each other. It's ostensibly a work of fiction, but it's also a thinly disguised veil of her own family, and it allows the major players to seek out part of their pasts, each attempting to find their own way.
A Family Daughter is richly plotted and multi-layered and it keeps constantly diverging, introducing characters existing in the periphery of the Santerres' lives; at one stage, the narrative even switches gears to Argentina. There's a spoilt countess, a devious Hungarian prostitute, and a calculating French lawyer, with Meloy always contrasting these points of view, exposing the miscommunications, disappointments and expectations of this family and the people that fall within their radar.
Teddy, the patriarch, with his ailing eyesight and declining health wonders why his family make the kind of decisions they do and choose to live errant lives. An old style Catholic father, his beliefs made him rigid - he wonders why Jamie hadn't settled down the way he expected, and that his daughters lives were not what he wanted for them, "we all knew in all of these cases that he hoped that things would turn out differently," Teddy represents the old guard, wanting what is understandable and morally unambiguous and not filled with strife, "to trust Go and sow faith and Love."
At the novel's end, none of the characters ever really achieve Teddy's wishes: Clarissa remains capricious and selfish, the bored Margot reconnects with an old flame and throws herself into an affair, handsome Jamie marries for convenience not love, and the lovely Abby remains baffled at her family's dysfunctions and contradictions.
While A Family Daughter isn't as tightly plotted and as realistic as its prequel Liars and Saints, the novel is still an unusual examination of a modern American family in crisis, "a crazy invented family." The problem with a second novel is that it must prolong the curiosity of the first, move the story along and also keep the characters from becoming dull. For those who enjoyed Liars and Saints, this novel is certainly an excellent connection to past characters as well as bridging the gap to the next generation. The good news is that A Family Daughter also works as a stand-alone novel; it's a compelling portrait of a family where faith, God and logic sit uneasily side by side. Mike Leonard April 06.
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