Review by Booklist Review
Portraying a family's disintegration, Canadian novelist Dey's (Heartbreaker, 2018) third novel blurs self with other to create an estrangement so painful that the only escape is in art. Using flashbacks and shifting perspectives, Dey depicts how Paul, a writer, confides in his actress-playwright daughter, Mona, about his romantic affairs, creating a parasitic intimacy; both crave the other's affection but fail to capture it. As familial trauma is unearthed, their father-daughter connection demonstrates how the hunger for love compels a person to inhabit another while whispering memories of betrayal. In addition to scenes of rape, abortion, a suicide attempt, and child mistreatment, the novel also contains toxic relationships. Despite this heaviness, Dey's narrative voice is restrained, as if the distance between her characters is recreated between us and the book, which is apt for a novel examining articulations of pain. Readers ready for an emotionally intense experience will find that Daughter brings unforgiving perspectives on life imitating art, or as Mona's half sister condemns, "Your love has been a performance."
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Dey's obtuse, melodramatic latest (following Heartbreaker), playwright and actor Mona Dean must deal with her egocentric father, Paul, whose novel Daughter made him famous. Paul, divorced from Mona's mother, has multiple affairs and makes Mona his confidante, but when news gets out of his relationship with his publicist, Mona's stepmother, Cherry, is furious, and Mona's half sister, Eva, cuts off contact with Mona for keeping Paul's secret. As Mona and Paul meet at restaurants, drink wine, and pore over his confessions, she mourns her lost connection with Eva while facing her own demons: a rape in theater school by a now-famous director that still haunts her, guilt over stealing her now-husband from her best friend, and a stillbirth that leads to a suicide attempt and psychiatric supervision. Mona finds salvation, of sorts, in writing: "I wrote as an act of conversion, of taking the severed parts of my life and assembling them, and in assembling them into a new form, separate from me, they lost their power over me." Dey's mostly flat, unvaried prose style becomes tiring, and despite a satisfying ending, readers will likely run out of steam before they make it there. This disappoints. Agent: Martha Webb, Cooke McDermid. (Sept.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Dey, a Canadian playwright and novelist, offers a detailed account of family relations when the father is a famous writer. Narrator Mona Dean, herself a playwright, sums up the whole novel early on: "I had never gotten over my childhood." Eighteen years earlier, when Mona was 11, her father, Paul, left her mother, Natasha, for his second wife, Cherry. Cherry poisoned him against Mona and her older sister, Juliet, so both girls, like their mother, suffered abandonment. Mona still suffers. A former boxer whose critically acclaimed novel shares the title of Dey's, Paul comes across as a horrible hybrid of Mailer and Hemingway. (Not coincidentally, Mona performs in her own one-woman play about Hemingway's doomed granddaughter, Margot; its first line is "To be loved by your father is to be loved by God.") Mona's internal dialogue dominates. Even when other characters' perspectives are offered in occasional third-person descriptions, one senses that Mona, like a novelist, is imagining them to support her own belief that Cherry is an evil stepmother and Eva, Paul and Cherry's daughter, a malignant half sister. Along with bouts of extreme grief, depression, and jealousy, Mona suffers a litany of trials: her parents' divorce, an abortion at 15, rape in graduate school, a pregnancy ending in a stillbirth followed by a life-threatening medical crisis. Each incident is real and traumatic, but together the list feels like authorial overkill. So does Mona's frequent self-congratulation. She makes it clear that she's renowned for her talent and beauty and crows about her handsome and adoring partner; her loyal, remarkably forgiving best friend; and the unwavering support she's received from Natasha and Juliet. As for Paul, Mona (or the author) can't help excusing the wishy-washy narcissist because the poor guy has been manipulated by Cherry and is tortured over his writing. Actually, everyone in this novel is tortured. Expect sharp observations and fluid prose; don't expect a sense of humor. Dey's characters take themselves very seriously. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
