Member Review
Review by
Christina D, Reviewer
3.5 stars
In "My Daughter's Secret," Trope begins with a college-age daughter's (Julia) suicide and her mother's (Claire) quest to find out why she chose to do so. While I can certainly empathize and appreciate a mother's deep anguish, sadness, sense of loss over a child's suicide, the first half of the book seemed to dwell, at undue length, on her mother's extreme difficulty in the aftermath. The book tends to slow down as a result, with the first half to third ceaselessly driving this home and at some point, I began to lose interest (and hope) that there would ever be an end to her self-deprecating inner dialogue about why Julia committed suicide and her faults as a mother. Claire runs down a few leads, which end up being dead ends, and then as she returns home to Sydney (the book is set in New South Wales, and the daughter, Julia, attends university in Melbourne), she begins to piece together the puzzle left behind in the form of letters from Julia's love interest. From there, the novel picks up and in the final quarter of the book, Trope delivers a whopper (i.e., the catalyst for Julia's suicide) and then quickly ends the book.
Like other reviewers, I felt there was a lot to digest here in terms of a dysfunctional family history. While the ending was worthwhile, I'm not 100% certain I'd recommend this unless the reader is up for a book heavy on family drama, domestic abuse, and not prone to triggers of predatory men, "reformed" abusers and/or a mother's grief of her child. The writing was solid, but some additional editing would have been beneficial in terms of repetitiveness.
Thanks to NetGalley for an advanced copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.
In "My Daughter's Secret," Trope begins with a college-age daughter's (Julia) suicide and her mother's (Claire) quest to find out why she chose to do so. While I can certainly empathize and appreciate a mother's deep anguish, sadness, sense of loss over a child's suicide, the first half of the book seemed to dwell, at undue length, on her mother's extreme difficulty in the aftermath. The book tends to slow down as a result, with the first half to third ceaselessly driving this home and at some point, I began to lose interest (and hope) that there would ever be an end to her self-deprecating inner dialogue about why Julia committed suicide and her faults as a mother. Claire runs down a few leads, which end up being dead ends, and then as she returns home to Sydney (the book is set in New South Wales, and the daughter, Julia, attends university in Melbourne), she begins to piece together the puzzle left behind in the form of letters from Julia's love interest. From there, the novel picks up and in the final quarter of the book, Trope delivers a whopper (i.e., the catalyst for Julia's suicide) and then quickly ends the book.
Like other reviewers, I felt there was a lot to digest here in terms of a dysfunctional family history. While the ending was worthwhile, I'm not 100% certain I'd recommend this unless the reader is up for a book heavy on family drama, domestic abuse, and not prone to triggers of predatory men, "reformed" abusers and/or a mother's grief of her child. The writing was solid, but some additional editing would have been beneficial in terms of repetitiveness.
Thanks to NetGalley for an advanced copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.
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