Daughters (also published as Girls, title that I prefer) follows the story of two sisters, Mattie and Nora, and the thorny relationship with their famous late mother, brilliant yet deeply troubled artist Ingrid Olsen. As they embark on a road trip across the US to preserve Ingrid's legacy, they start to unpick the scars of the past - and realize that the ties that bound them, might also break them.

Kirsty Capes is a new-to-me author, but I already know that I will read everything she writes because I loooved reading her latest novel.
Daughters is simply a devastating read, it's a painful recollection of moments and feelings of two girls (now women) who survived a childhood with parents who didn't care for them. It's told partly in interview form (hence the comparison with Daisy Jones and the Six, this is darker and more intimate) and it's almost like reading a diary at times. I loved every single page of it, even thought there are parts that are a bit slow or too long. It's a funny yet heartbreaking and moving tale of motherhood, family bonds and relationships, with a pinch of love for art and creativity. If you're wondering if you'll need paper tissues, the answer is yes - the ending is beautiful but I cried, so probably will you.

The audiobook narration was amazing, especially Amber Gadd who impersonated different characters by switching accents - Ryan Laughton also did a great job. Overall I can say with confidence that Daughters is one of the best books I've read this year, and it will stay with me for a long time.

* I'd like to thank Kirsty Capes, RBMedia and NetGalley for providing this ALC in exchange for my honest review.

Upon reading the precis Kirsty Capes' Daughters, this seemed like it was written for me. I adore stories about families with damaged characters who overcome great difficulites, and bond in the process.

I hate to give just a three star rating to Daughters because at its core, this is a facinating story. I just didn't enjoy the way the tale is paced. I'm so glad it worked for so many readers, Daughters just didn't work for me.

The audio version of Daughters is performed by Amber Gadd and Ryan Laughton. I liked their voices, but they were not able to keep the story engaging for me throughout.

I just finished Daughter by Kirsty Capes, and wow… it’s one of those books that lingers.

This story is raw and unflinching—it doesn’t hold your hand, but it does hold a mirror up to the parts of life we don’t always talk about. It’s emotional, sometimes heavy, but also so real. The kind of real that settles in your chest and makes you think long after you've closed the book. The writing is beautiful—quietly powerful—and the main character’s voice is so honest, so vulnerable, it felt like she was telling me her story. It dives deep into identity, family, and the ache of feeling unmoored while trying to find where (or if) you fit.

This isn’t a light read, but it’s an important one. If you're in the mood for something introspective, moving, and deeply human—Daughter is worth every page.

I want to thank Netgalley and the author for gifting me the audio version. This book I was drawn to the cover and the synopsis sounded interesting and I was very exited to read this book.... but then the narration started...oh my word. It is so confusing. The voices were awful and I kept trying and trying to go back and listen to it but I just find it is not for me. I swear the voices sounded AI generated! They didn't have any emotion in their voice and very monotone. I am sorry this was just not for me.

A poignant exploration of family and identity with strong emotional resonance. Capes’ writing is heartfelt, though some secondary arcs felt unresolved. A moving read that lingers. The audiobook performance adds to the experience. Thank you to NetGalley for the audio arc.

Mattie is 9 years older than her sister, Nora and they are the daughters of Ingrid Olssen, the renowned Norwegian artist, capricious Wunderkind and chaotic Mother. She has passed away and now there is a reckoning between the sisters for all the neglect and upheaval they suffered as youngsters, Aunt Karo steps in and fans the flames of discord.

During her lifetime Olssen stressed that what she created was “art for art’s sake” and her pieces were never to be sold. But Karo has initiated an exhibition in California and one sister is compliant with lending her inherited artworks, the other not.

We learn a great deal about their dysfunctional childhood in London, how they were abandoned for periods, their mother unavailable both emotionally and physically. Olsson was essentially a self-referring narcissist who catered to her own needs. When Olssen and the father of the two girls separated, there was a custody battle, neither parent wanting the responsibility of their off-spring.

Nora went on to suffer severe mental health issues, following on from a shooting in their home (just one of the catalysts, I would imagine) and Mattie in adolescence became a mother to Beanie. She is now in a relationship with her mother’s biographer, which underlines the lack of boundaries that were – and still are – rife within the family dynamic.

As the date of the exhibition in California approaches, Mattie, Nora and Beanie embark on a road trip, landing in Phoenix, with the express purpose of fulfilling their mother’s wishes of dropping her ashes in a canyon. Then, their intention is to move on to the exhibition venue, via Los Angeles, the city described as “…dirty and unremarkable, architecture on top of architecture on top of advertisement with no discernible pattern or reason .. towards Sunset Strip…”.

From there it is a hop and a skip to San Franciso: “…on the descent into San Francisco, via Halfmoon Bay on Highway 1 morphing into the freeway, the climate changed again. The air moist, the sky overcast and the roads lined with thickets of green trees and grass. There was nothing to see here except endless, perfect landscape, the sea, the sky, the mountains behind. It was so picturesque that it exhausted my eyes. The city itself seemed to creep up on us…” They have arrived in the town where Olsson’s retrospective will be held and they intend to attend.

This is a story of the three women recalibrating their relationships, chewing through the years of abuse and neglect and having a bit of fun on the road. It is a beautifully told story, the author has wonderful writing skills and a sense of the absurd, but it really is overly long and detailed as it revisits various events and underlines the tough nature of their upbringing and the vagaries of Olsson’s personality. It then spins out the ending, which, although poignant in many ways, needed tightening.

Art, essentially, was the artist’s raison d’être and the children an inconvenience and this novel charts the fall-out on the subsequent generations.

I really enjoyed this novel as an audiobook, the narrator did a decent job grappling with various accents, which made it an entertaining listen.

I thought this book would be a good read but overall I just couldn't get into it. The narrator was good but the book was overly slow.

I thought for sure I would like this book, loved the cover the premise but it just wasn't something I could get into. I tried, and kept trying and decided it just isn't for me. I am sorry! Thankful for the arc.

Daughters (or Girls? My ARC copy was called Daughters) was a picture of generational trauma. Ingrid Oelson and Edward Robb are objectively shit parents. Throughout her battles with addiction, Ingrid leaves her daughters for days at a time without food or money, coming back home with a smile on her face and confusion on what she possibly could have done wrong. Edward is barely present - a Disneyland dad who works as an actor in Hollywood, visiting once a year on average. Matilda and Nora are products of their tumultuous upbringing. Nora, an artist, has a complicated relationship with her mother. She is an artist, at times mirroring her mother's work while trying to make her own statements and create a separate persona in the art world. Matilda is a children's psychologist, attempting to balance her own childhood issues while helping the children around her.

This book was enjoyable, but it was not what I was expecting. I expected a more light hearted with macabre humor style road trip adventure, but it became clear this was more of a harsh light on the darkness of childhood abuse/neglect and the realities of being mentally ill. I see why the Dolly Parton plot had to happen, but it felt so incredibly out of left field that it broke me out of the story for a little while. The audio narration was great, and although I didn't expect to enjoy the dual narrator situation, I felt that the male narrator helped break us out of the main story and deliver us into the autobiography that Richard was writing as the story progressed.

Thank you to NetGalley and RBMedia for an advance copy of this book!

Thank you NetGalley and RB media for the ARC.

Oh, my heart. This story took a toll on me...In all the best ways. Hello Beautiful was my favorite read of 2023 and I would put Daughters right next to it. Kirsty Capes really dives into the sometimes messy dynamic of sisters. In the case of Mattie and Nora, it wasn't your normal sister situation. They were the daughters of a world-renowned painter from England and an American television star. They were neglected and basically made to fend for themselves. On their mother's deathbed, she asked them to burn it all. All of her paintings, everything she put into the world - she wanted it gone.

Two years after their mother's death, they haven't spoken or seen each other. Nora has a mental health emergency and Mattie steps up the way big sisters do. During this time, Nora is talked into letting her mother's work being in an exhibit and after having second thoughts, Mattie, Nora and Mattie's teenage daughter go on a road trip to stop the exhibition.

The story is told through the current time, looking back on their lives growing up and through transcripts of interviews for a biography that is being written about their mother. It is a funny yet heart-breaking tale of motherhood, sisterhood, and the ties that bind us all together. Another book to add to my library! (Both the UK and US versions!) Bravo Kirsty Capes!!!!!!

The audiobook kept me drawn in. Amber Gadd's narration was almost intoxicating for me. She did a great job of changing up just enough to be able to differentiate between the different characters. I will say that the accent for Aunt Caro drove me nuts. But Aunt Caro drove me nuts, so I don't know if the strong Swedish accent bothered me for that reason. Ryan Laughton also did a great job as Richard. Fabulous narrators! I will be on the lookout for other books with them.

I found this story and the relationships depicted a delight to read. The story takes twists that I did not expect and kept me guessing in parts.

The issues around mental health are portrayed with respect while delivering some harsh realities of the impact it has on those affected and the people around them.

The relationships forged between Peppa, Ivan, and Gogo are interesting, fun, loyal and life-long. As is the relationship between Brendan and Peppa in addition to heartbreaking at times.

I would like to have read some more closure on Peppa's relationship with her parents, especially her dear old Dad. However, I can appreciate the Author's honesty when it comes to the stark realities that life can be for many.

This review is sounding very melancholy which is due to the underlying topics but it was a good read and even funny in parts.

Thankyou to #Netgalley and publisher #CentralAvenue for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I understand comparing a book to another popular one or pointing out a trope is the way these days to market books, but I also think the comparisons to Daisy Jones & The Six and the emphasis on the road trip part of DAUGHTERS actually do a disservice to the reader. For one, the excerpts of interviews (that give the "documentary" style of Taylor Jenkins Reid's novel) are much more prominent in the beginning of the book, making you think the main character is Ingrid, and although the format is great at giving you an outsider view of her, it slowly stops being used as you spend more time in the present timeline with Mattie and Nora. As for the road trip "trope", it can be frustrating to realize it only takes place in the second half of the book and it is not the main event. All that said, Kirsty Capes's book is much more than those two devices to call readers attention. This is a book about two sisters that, in spite of having terrible parents and a very difficult upbringing, are still trying to connect with each other and forgive each other and themselves for how they handled their past - they were just kids trying their best, trying to survive and still believe that they are deserving of love and caring.
As you follow along the reading, the roots of Nora's mental health issues are laid: from being constantly left unsupervised from a very young age, to interactions with a narcissistic and alcoholic mother, to feeling abandoned from her 9 years older sister, and later in life being constantly compared to her mother in her work. She realizes nobody is coming to save her and more than once she is not sure if she wants to survive. Through Capes' writing, you understand how deeply Nora feels everything and how hurt she is from Mattie's scaping the house without her. But you also understand that Mattie was not much more equipped to take her sister. She was just a teenager and although she deals with her pain in a different way, she's is also hurting and dealing with a lot of guilty. It was beautiful seeing how hard they were fighting to open up to each other again, the complexity of their feelings towards each other and even harder to read about how all of the adults in their life were uncapable of taking accountability in their actions. And still, until the end the sisters were set in honoring their mother’s wishes - another demonstration on the writer's part of how much she understands human complexity. It would be much easier to just hate Ingrid.
This is a heavy read in its themes, so I don't think the humor here is enough to call it comic, it is more like life: even in the hard times, we try to find beauty and joy. And I couldn't help but wish that Mattie and Nora were able to find their way back to each other and find happiness.

Two sisters are looking to heal from their childhood trauma after their mother passes away. Told from the perspective of Matilda, or Mattie, we hear how she and her sister grew up with an artist as their mother and a father who wasn't in their lives.

This story was a slow start for me, but it did pick up. I felt as though there were areas that could've been different, but in the end it came together. It was an emotional read! I wouldn't say it was just like Daisy Jones, but I can see SLIGHT similarities.

3.5

Thanks to the publisher for the advanced copy.

DNF at 20%

After reading the synopsis i was quite excited to start with 'Daughters" unfortunately the production of the audiobook let me down.
Found it difficult to engage and follow the story.
The narrations just isn't working for me either - its confusing to follow, too monotone and the attempt of a Norwegian accent got tiering pretty quickly

Thanks to NetGalley for an advanced copy of the audiobook.

The complicated mother/daughter and sister relationships that were front and center in this book were incredibly thought provoking and will be a significant take away for me from Daughters. I was pleasantly surprised by the hopefulness that ended the book.

After a bit of confusion and having marked this yesterday as currently reading Girls by the author, I went into to mark it as want to read and realised it’s actually a re release under the new title Daughters.

I feel like this will be a marmite of a novel, I hate marmite, I loved this. There is a content warning at the outset, but to reiterate the novel almost entirely works around addiction. Self harm. Suicide. Mental health and child abandonment and neglect.

Initially I didn’t think this would be for me but almost an hour in I was hooked. Following the death of their mother, a notoriously troubled and world renowned artist. The novel sees Mattie and Nora reunite on the brink of a legacy exhibition of their mother’s work, an exhibition that neither sister wants, their mother certainly didn’t want but organised by their aunt. Cue a road trip together with Mattie’s daughter Beans on a mission to stop the exhibition and scatter Ingrid’s ashes along the way. The sisters rehash their whole lives, the terrible traumatic childhood they endured, and Nora’s own mental health journey. I won’t forget these characters. Beautifully written.

The story is frank, raw, brutal at times and the ending was devastating and hopeful. It was at times hard to remember I was reading fiction, I believed this story,

The audio narration was perfect.

Huge thanks to RB Media and NetGalley for the opportunity to review this audiobook, available now.

This book started out really strong and I just loved the writing and characters. The author beautifully delved into topics of family, addiction and fame. At first, I couldn't put this book down and really just enjoyed getting to know each character and experiencing their lives. I was convinced starting out that I would give this book 5 stars. However, about half way through the book it got really slow and I lost interest in the book. I do think the author is very talented as these topics are not easy to write about and she really did beautifully, but I think a change in the overall storyline or pacing could have kept it as a 5 star book. This one didn't completely land for me, but I can see why it resonated so deeply with others. I recommend it for those who love a good slow paced character-driven story!

This complex, heavy family drama deals with some substantial and important topics such as mental illness, trauma, suicide, addiction and parental neglect but is told in such a clever way that it never felt too burdensome. The sisters unstable upbringing with an unwell but famous single mother, who is a renowned artist but a terrible parent, successfully transports the reader to a past coming-of-age timeline that I thoroughly enjoyed.

The detailed examination of the relationships between characters (i.e.: mother-daughter, sisters, romantic, etc.) were so well written that they were impactful, raw and real. The characters themselves were wonderfully developed and evoked empathy (in the case of the girls) or anger (in the case of their father) making them feel genuine and believable.

Tragic with a touch of dark comedy, this story stayed with me long after it was finished.

In regards to the audio, the only complaint that I have is with the dual narration. I would have preferred to stick with Amber Gadd exclusively, removing all of the interview components. I found them to be somewhat jarring and at times completely pulled me out of the story but that, of course, is just a personal preference.

Overall, this was an excellent novel and production. If you are a fan of moving yet complicated dysfunctional family dynamics than I would definitely recommend this book.

Thank you NetGalley and RB Media for access to the audiobook in exchange for an honest review.

4.5 stars!

What an epic, beautiful, poignant, and oh so real depiction of two sisters, Matilda and Nora, who had to endure an extremely dysfunctional upbringing with two highly narcissistic parents, one an artist, the other an actor. While this might sound like a potentially dark and depressing book, the author skillfully turns this origin story on its head by placing the two on a "road trip," with Matilda's teenage daughter Beanie along for the adventure, from London to Arizona, to LA, to San Francisco so they can ultimately attend their deceased mother, Ingrid Olsson's, exhibition at the San Fran Museum of Modern Art - an exhibition that she would have hated.

A book that can both manage to make you deeply feel the desperation and anger of being a child with such neglectful parents, while at the same time adding so much hilarity throughout the road trip (was it really Dolly Parton, or wasn't it?), and such overwhelming love between the main characters (even when yelling at each other in a tragicomedy scene that I will be chuckling about for a long time) is one that without preaching it, subliminally and expertly exemplifies what all of our lives are about - some parts outrage, some hilarity, many times filled with love even when we least expect it or realize it.

I loved this book, rewinding it numerous times because I wanted to hear again how expertly it was written, with details of the settings, emotions, and connections that made you really see and feel these characters, their inner struggles to do better, to find peace, to find love, even after some of the hardest things one can imagine enduring in a family and with one's sibling. Highest recommendation.

I think author Kirsty Capes, NetGalley, and publisher RBMedia for the opportunity to hear this audiobook ARC. This is my honest review.

Thank you, NetGalley for the ARC copy of this audiobook. I don't know if it was the author's writing or if it was the narrator's performance, but I didn't find anything that I necessarily enjoy. I didn't find the characters likable.

It wasn't bad. However, I don't think I would've missed out on anything coming across this book. Which is such a hard thing to say because I usually try to find something that I could add. Something to show what insight I could gain from this.
Nobody likes to give a bad or subpar review. Especially when you know how hard an author has worked.