Life, it can be challenging, whether you're a therapist by profession or not. Favourite Daughter weaves plausible characters with wit and issues. Having watched (perhaps discovered it quite late), In Treatment, this book intrigued me and feels very real with a rather different take on family drama.

Life, it can be challenging, whether you're a therapist by profession or not. Favourite Daughter weaves plausible characters with wit and issues. Having watched (perhaps discovered it quite late), In Treatment, this book intrigued me and feels very real with a rather different take on family drama.

Dick crafts a narrative that delves into the psychological depths of her characters, presenting them as deeply flawed human beings. Aren't we all?. The novel's strength lies in its raw portrayal of complex emotions and the ethical dilemmas faced by the characters. While some readers may find the characters' actions challenging, the story offers a thought-provoking read about the impact of family dynamics.​

Overall, Favourite Daughter is a promising debut that combines personal and family struggles. It's a compelling read for those interested in character-driven stories that don't shy away from the messiness of human relationships and complicated family dynamics.

When kindergarten teacher Mickey learns of her father’s death through an obituary, her reaction is one of indifference. At 33, her life is relatively simple—aside from a fondness for vodka and secret binges of Bridgerton. So when her father’s lawyer unexpectedly reaches out, she’s blindsided. After all, it’s been 26 years since he abandoned her and her mother. The real shock? He’s left her a substantial inheritance—one with significant strings attached.

Circumstances soon draw Mickey into the orbit of Arlo (also known as Charlotte), her half-sister and a psychologist. What begins as a reluctant connection becomes a tangled emotional journey, with both women confronting truths they'd long buried. One is a therapist, the other a reluctant participant, but both are searching—for answers, for reconciliation, for something solid to hold onto. Will their bond survive what they uncover?

This novel is deeply emotional, beautifully written, and thought-provoking. It explores the raw terrain of grief and the many ways it manifests, while also diving into the intricacies of familial relationships—particularly the complicated bonds between parent and child. These dynamics evolve throughout the story, sometimes painfully, sometimes with glimmers of hope. The author handles these shifting tones with grace, taking readers on an emotional rollercoaster—at times intense and chaotic, like witnessing lives derail in real time.

What stands out most is the sharp, empathetic characterisation. These are flawed, hurting people, yet they’re rendered with such care that you can’t help but root for them—even when they sabotage themselves. Mickey, in particular, is a complex mix of vulnerability and resistance. At times I wanted to hug her; other times, I wanted to give her a firm shake. The interactions between Mickey and Arlo are especially powerful—tense, raw, and emotionally charged as they attempt to make sense of their shared past and uncertain future.

The ending strikes just the right note, offering a sense of resolution and the possibility of healing after so much turmoil.

Overall, this is a moving and memorable read, one that pulled me in completely. A compelling, heartfelt novel delivered with wit, depth, and emotional authenticity.

Thanks to NetGalley for the opportunity to read this advance copy

This was a great book that delved into topics such as father/daughter relationships and addiction. It was quite heavy at times but I was very emotionally invested and it was very well written highly recommend

Two half-sisters who have never met find themselves in a very strange position following the death of their father. Charlotte and Michelle have had very different upbringings as.a result of their father abandoning his first wife (and daughter); they are outwardly different but maybe they have more in common than they realize.

This is a very entertaining story on the surface but also looks at father-daughter and to a lesser extent mother-daughter relationships.

I wasn't sure what to expect when I started reading this one but I was pleasantly surprised at the did not notice the time passing as I raced through the chapters. Favourite Daughter is an excellently written slightly off-beat story that I would highly recommend to others!!

Favourite Daughter @morgandick_author 💖🌸💚🌿

Follows Mickey, a teacher who learns that she is to be given the fortune that her father has left behind. After not seeing her father in 26 years this is a massive surprise. She is given one condition before she is given the money, she must go to therapy.

Arlo is a Therapist, has just lost her farther, she has been beside his side for years throughout his treatment and care, now she is shocked by news regarding her inheritance.

I really enjoyed this emotional and thought provoking book, the characters and relationships are complicated and raw, I loved that.

⭐️⭐️⭐️💫 3.5

4/5

Despite the cover I really enjoyed this book, which I thought was going to be a lot more lighthearted than it was.

Mickey Morris is a kindergarten teacher with an alcohol problem. Mickey's absent father just died, which she's not too bothered about since he abandoned her and her mother when she was only a child. However her father has left her a fortune but to get it she must undergo several sessions of therapy with Arlo.

Arlo's is a psychologist whose beloved father just died. But before his demise he cut her completely out of his will. Arlo is devastated to learn that he has left millions to his estranged child, Michelle Kowalski. She is dealing with her own problems at her practice, having lost a client to suicide.

The two sisters are thrown together without realising who the other is. The question is, is Mickey prepared to face up to her demons and admit that she uses alcohol to get along in the world? And will Arlo's rage at her father's final act blind her to helping any clients as her love for him before he died had left her almost friendless before his death.

This book deals with some incredibly difficult subjects - child abandonment, alcoholism, professional ethics and suicide. It sounds as though it would be two sisters at each other's throats but Morgan Dick deals with it in a very sensitive way. She brings in other characters to round out Mickey and Arlo and give them some depth but both, deeply flawed as they are, are very likeable.

A really good read that kept my attention throughout and I enjoyed coming back to. I would recommend this highly.

Thankyou to Netgalley and Penguin for the advance review copy.

This was an interesting book showing grief and addiction.
How things can affect different people, even within the same family.

At times I struggled to get through this. The writing felt slow and dragging. But overall it tackles important topics.

Evidence suggests that unless preferential treatment is extreme, most offspring are not impacted by being the least favourite child. But I think being left $5.5m in a father’s will versus being disinherited at the eleventh hour definitely constitutes both ‘preferential’ and ‘extreme’ treatment!
Mickey was abandoned by her father at age seven and later by her mother too, when Mickey’s alcohol addiction dictated that her mother institute some boundaries in their relationship. We meet Mickey, a well-intentioned kindergarten teacher, on the verge of an ill-advised choice.
Arlo is a therapist who adored her father and who cared for him her whole life, especially as his health deteriorated. But she depended on him excessively with her own life decisions, and her training has ill-prepared her to handle the grief his death triggers.
So it is a shock to both half-sisters to separately discover it is Mickey who is the will’s beneficiary, but with the stipulation that she attends seven sessions at a prescribed therapy practice. Arlo’s! From beyond the grave is their father orchestrating his daughters’ first meeting, hoping they will remedy each other’s problems and in doing so right a lifetime of his own wrongs?
The story draws on Dick’s personal struggles with mental health issues and the extent to which they can be resolved. Through Mickey, she explores living with an addiction and developing the self-awareness to recognise the delusion of being in control. And with Arlo we experience a crisis of self-confidence leading to breaches of ethics and trust resulting in selfish behaviour bordering on the predatory.
The narrative is told from the alternating messiness of the half-sister’s lives and perspectives and constructed around a concept with some important messages to impart. It is pacy and entertaining despite all the characters being flawed, albeit my preferred treatment would have seen the women’s experiences take the reader to even darker places and for the plotlines to be slightly less neatly tessellated.

Mickey and Arlo are half-sisters. But they've never spoken and never met. Arlo adored her father - but always lived in the shadow of his personality and burdensome vices. Meanwhile, their father abandoned Mickey and her mother years ago, and Mickey has hated him ever since. When she receives news of her fathers passing, Mickey is shocked to learn that he's left her his not inconsiderable fortune. Mickey must attend a series of therapy sessions before the money can be released. Unbeknownist to either woman. the psychologist Mickey's father has ensured she meets with her half'sister Arlo.

Mickey has had no contact with her father for twenty-six years. Then her father's lawyer contacts her to tell her that her father has passed away, and that he has left her some money, but she can only access it after she has attended some therapy sessions. The therapist her father has chosen for her is \mickey's half-sister Arlo.

This is quite an emotional and shock-provoking read. The story is told from the sister's perspectives. I could not put it dpwn.

Published 1st May 2025

I would like to thank #NetGalley #PenguinGeneralUK and the author #MorganDick for my ARC of #FavouriteDaughter in exchange for an honest review.

This novel has so much dramatic irony that I was just gleefully anticipating the moment when the characters would realise what kind of situation they landed themselves in. The narrative alternates between two half-sisters after the recent death of their father. He has bequeathed five and a half million to his estranged daughter (Mickey/Michelle) from his first marriage and none to his other daughter from his second marriage (Arlo/Charlotte) on one condition: Mickey must attend seven therapy sessions, vouchers included. Unbeknownst to them both, the vouchers given to Mickey were for Arlo's services, so they end up in a therapist-client relationship. The funny thing is that they are both so, so messed up.

Mickey gets fired from her job as kindergarten teacher because her alcoholism is starting to affect her work days. In her mind, though, she's unable to see herself as anything but as a good person, a great teacher, someone who has their life together and is doing well in spite of her bad parents. In short, she perceives herself as a victim. Arlo, on the other hand, is still labouring under the delusion that her father was a wonderful man, a great father, her favourite person in the world, which is why she cannot process why she's been written out of the will.

As time progresses and the women confront others' opinions and versions of what happened, they start to lose faith in their respective worldviews. They also start to spiral, sometimes quite spectacularly. For Mickey, she must acknowledge that she needs help and to actually seek it; for Arlo, she needs to stop putting her father on a pedestal and acknowledge the harm that he has done to the four women in his life. Although the thing connecting them is not ideal—i.e., a shitty dad—Mickey and Arlo also learn what it means to be family.

Ok, so going to start by mentioning I read this in a single sitting. It was so compulsively readable that I just couldn’t put it down, with an engaging writing style that had me instantly hooked. The premise is a little bit farfetched, and there were times when character motivations became a little unbelievable, but overall this was a brilliant novel reflecting on themes of family, sisterhood, addiction, trauma and isolation.

Alcohol addiction was presented in a brutally realistic way, showing the impact this can have on family, personal relationships and your career. It was a tough read at times, but also a heartwarming one, providing detailed insight into addiction from two perspectives, and reflecting on the barriers to recovery.

Some conflicts in this did seem to be resolved too easily, and it didn’t always feel fully believable. I was happy for the characters, but thought that everything was wrapped up a bit too neatly, particularly given the time frame. Also there was an unnecessary reference to a few awful real people, which didn’t need to be there and didn’t mesh well with the character voice for me. However, I loved this overall, and was captivated by the world and characters the author created.

One of my favourite bits of this was seeing the sisters interact, especially when they didn’t know much about each other. It was interesting to watch their relationship develop across the book as they bonded over similar experiences, despite their differences. Both were fantastic characters, realistically flawed but loveable, and I enjoyed reading about them.

A thoroughly engaging, emotional and heartwarming novel. Thank you to @vikingbooksuk for the NetGalley arc 😊

This book was the ultimate rollercoaster ride as we followed two sisters who were in such close proximity to one another but painfully oblivious to it.

I found the humour and attention to detail really great at the start of the book, it felt a bit like a lot of effort was made to establish Arlo and Mickey and their distinct characters initially and then their identities became more dilute in a way as the book progressed. I loved 'kindergarten teachers never peed. They'd evolved past it' - the perfect combination of dry humour and high specificity from Mickey. Arlo was also an interesting character and it felt like she was such a well formed character that I could see her struggling to turn her work side as a 'therapist' off.

The nature of the plot did feel very clever and unique. As a reader, you're constantly aware of things that both characters have yet to discover so there was a fun sense of foreshadowing and waiting for everything to unravel. You see the messiness of life through both Mickey and Arlo's POV and it did feel really real. Neither of them end up being the villains of the story, just broken humans in their own morally ambiguous ways. Both Mickey and Arlo did feel like fully fleshed out characters and that made their POVS pretty easy to follow. My only issue is that their relationship lacked the depth that they individually as characters had. Because they aren't aware of their relation for most of the book, you see a lot of them interacting and thus learn a lot about each character individually but their bond never really felt like it was formed. This weakened the overall attachment I felt to what is a highly sentimental and riveting plot. And this extended to other relationships too. I didn't feel like I got under the skin of either Mickey or Arlo's relationship with Samson or Mickey's mum.

There were a couple plot points that felt unrealistic. Firstly, how did Mickey know Ian's address? He is her student and a literal child yet somehow she knows his address and drops him home. Also the fact that both Mickey and Arlo had altered their names so significantly felt unrealistic. It felt like surely Mickey would've recognised Arlo's name or clocked that Arlo was short for Charlotte which is the name of her stepsister? It was all a little too convenient that both of them didn't recognise each other's names at all.

4.5 ~ This was a really good book!! It was a really interesting way to tell the story of grief and mental health and complicated family dynamics and I found myself really rooting for both Mickey and Arlo.

Mickey is an alcoholic, kindergarten teacher whose father abandoned her at age 7. Arlo is a psychologist whose doting (although extremely flawed) father has just passed away. Plot twist - both father’s are the same guy.

Both Mickey and Arlo struggle to come to terms with the death of their father for different reasons including the fact that Arlo has been cut out of the will and the entire (hefty) fortune has been left to Mickey. But to get the money, Mickey must attend 7 therapy sessions with her half-sister, who she’s never met.

I really enjoyed the story and all the characters, even though most were inherently flawed but they all had incredibly redeeming qualities which made me really root for them and their stories. I thought the character development (of all characters not just Mickey and Arlo) was really well done and the book was super nuanced and straight to the point.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for a copy of the eARC to review.

Thanks Netgalley and the Publisher. Not sure what I feel about this book, it was okay but not great and did not click with the characters either.

This will sneak up on you. Mickey's father left when she was seven and she's never met her step-sister Arlo until now. And that's because her father left her $5.5 million on the condition that she do seven therapy sessions with the therapist he's chosen and paid for. Who turns out to Arlo, which either woman will realize until late in the novel. Mickey's life is falling apart due to her drinking and an ill advised decision to take Ian, one of her kindergarten students, home when no one picks him up. That does introduce her to Chris but it also gets her suspend and sends her really spiraling. Meanwhile Arlo is devastated that her father, the man she cared for in his illness, left her nothing. But he didn't because these two will built a relationship whether they realize who they are or not. Add in Tom the somewhat creepy lawyer, Mickey's neighbor and her cat, and the rest and this makes for a layered read about addiction, abandonment, and forgiveness. It's beautifully written and compelling. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. An impressive debut and a terrific read.

Favourite Daughter sees half-sisters Mickey and Arlo brought together as a condition of their late father’s will. When Mickey unknowingly attends therapy sessions with Arlo, they are both forced to confront their own issues resounding from their relationships with him.

I found the premise of the book compelling. Morgan Dick is daring to ask ‘who has it worse: the daughter who is abandoned, or the who he chose to stick around for?’

In reading the story, it is clear that both daughters have suffered as a result of their relationship with their father, and both make questionable decisions throughout. I got absorbed into the story early on and found the storytelling was aided by the pace and length of the chapters.

The author writes the characters with compassion. The supporting characters are also not perfect, and this allows both Mickey and Arlo to show up as very real, messy humans. However, on finishing the book, I was unconvinced by the resolution, finding it rather neat and convenient and not representative of the overall complexity of the story.

Favourite Daughter is a book for readers who are interested in mental health, dark, emotional themes, and morally-conflicted characters.

Absolute bonkers concept, which I thought would turn into a cooky and quirky story (in the most derogatory way possible) and I'm so glad it wasn't that. This is a very dark and un-apologetic story of family related trauma (insert daddy issue joke here). Though it sets up some pretty wild situations, often times there simply is no punchline and we are just left to deal with the aftermath of the characters how mistakes and shortcomings. And it works really well - it deals with situations that have too often been taking too light-heartedly (mainly alcoholism and the difficulties of having or being a flawed parent) and gives us an incisive portrait of characters that are essentially trying to process the bad things people have done to them, while confronting the bad things that they have, in turn, done to themselves and to the people around them.

An interesting read, touching on themes of addiction and dysfunctional families with a cast of mainly unlikeable characters.

My thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an ARC of this book

This was a great read, seeing how both sisters deal with loss, uncovering their relationship and their past.