A Family Daughter by Maile Meloy

by Kay Fair
(USA)

I went looking for the novel Liars and Saints by Maile Meloy, but I ended up with the sequel, A Family Daughter.

I recognized my disadvantage as a reader immediately in attempting to read books out of sequence. While this novel does work as a stand-alone story (for the most part), I found myself wondering how much of the unexpected twists of the book were pure genius on the author's part; a wonderful example of keeping a reader on his or her toes by changing expectations every other page... versus how much of these plot turns were based on prior knowledge a reader would have garnered from the first book.

As said, if the author is really just a discontinuous writer, jumping freely through time and setting, without feeling the burning need to fill in all the blanks between point A and point B, then major kudos for overcoming the compulsion that plagues so many less trusting, hyper-controlling authors.

I genuinely cared about Abby, our main character who hails from a dysfunctional Catholic family. While I try and avoid "spoilers," I will simply allude to Abby's confused sexual relationship with a family member. It sounds revolting, I know. But the point was not incest, but rather a universal "wrong" relationship. No one could fail to see the impropriety in Abby's inter-familial coitus, and the author therefore had a fault in her character that would be acknowledged and judged by virtually any type of reader. By establishing this wrong relationship, the author is then free to dissect the fuel, course, and finality of relationships built on error.