I love a dysfunction family story, so Daughter was right up my alley. I appreciated the different perspectives of the book and the exploration of the father-daughter relationship.

Dey takes her readers on a vulnerable exploration of a complicated father-daughter relationship.

Mona's father Paul has never been able to give her what she needs. Distracted by his once successful playwriting and his many women, he forces her to grapple with navigating a relationship with someone you otherwise wouldn't give your time to. It was a very intimate look at the long term effects of being forced to be your parent's confidant as they muddle their way through their life.

I have mixed feelings about this book. I appreciate the uniqueness of this story, while giving light to what is likely the experience of more people than we know. I could relate to having to be your parent's confidant as they navigate their relationship struggles. However, I was never sucked into this story. I took many days to get through, despite the fact that it is under 200 pages. I found it to be one long stream of consciousness without a breath, often getting bogged down in recounting emails sent from one person via another. I often found myself losing my place, and having to go back and re-read it.

Overall, I think is book is worthy of reading, especially if you have struggled with complicated parent-child relationships and can find a part of your story in Mona's.

Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NetGalley, and Claudia Dey for this ARC.

Tightly wound and twisted, this had me on the edge of my seat just because of the well crafted tense relationship between father and daughter. At times even hard to read in how aptly it describes the complicated-ness of families.

DAUGHTER is hands down one of the best books I've read so far this year.

It's a heartbreaking story about family---how difficult it is to escape certain ties, or to have other ties severed without being given the opportunity to mend them. At the center of the novel is a family of artists, a family that fractures. But the most fascinating relationship is that between Mona and her father Paul. She loathes Paul, yet cannot manage to escape him. Wants to be his best-friend and confidante, yet Paul is disagreeable, to say the least. At the same time, Mona is navigating various other traumas---some pages were harrowing, difficult to read. But as a whole, DAUGHTER shines.

Thanks to the publisher for the e-galley!

This was an intriguing book. It definitely won’t be for everyone but I liked it overall. The prose is spare in such a languid way that I almost found it hypnotic.

This is a story about a messy family estranged from each other, their toxic relationships, and a story about art and the women behind the male gaze. Paul is an author famous for his novel Daughter, who left his first family for a woman who could offer him security and comfort but who he could never love.

He has an affair with his young assistant and uses his first daughter Mona, confiding in her and manipulating her, in a way that will change their two families forever. Paul, in turn, is really a mediocre author, whose sentences were made beautiful by his first wife, Natasha, also his editor, who gave up a writing career to raise their two children; and who Paul always took for granted.

I found the head-bopping in this story a confusing stylistic choice. It moves between Mona’s first person point of view and the third person point of view of the other family members. I understood why the author did it but it felt like a gimmick, like the author was just trying to be edgy. I could never quite figure out who the main character or narrator was.

Also there was a bit of info dumping that got kind of dull to read in parts when the family wasn’t speaking and just communicating by email.

Normally I’m not a fan of messy family stories but other than those issues I found the characters and their motivations fascinating and very well developed.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an advance review copy. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

A twisted tale of family, manipulation and obligation, Daughter is the title of this book and also the famous book written by Paul in the novel. A famous writer, who hasn’t published since his successful novel Daughter, Paul is a man with complicated relationships with his daughters, his current wife, and his lover. The implosion of his family begins with the end of his affair with his publicist Lee, who his daughter Mona heard all about. Mona is the main narrator of the novel, though there are several third person passages about the other characters.

Mona is cut out of her sister Eva’s life following the affair, and so a years-long battle begins, coming to the surface after years of tension. Cherry, Paul’s current wife has always treated Mona and Juliet, Paul’s daughters from his first marriage, poorly, and the novel is concerned with their manipulations and betrayals of one another, always circling the person whose actions are usually the cause of the rift, Paul.

This was a fascinating family story, full of anger and pain, but also about the ways we imagine other people react to us. Dey’s writing is deft and cold, revealing the ways we hurt one another.

An interesting exercise on father and daughter relationships as well as nepotism. The people who are estranged in the main character's life also serve a purpose in understanding connection. The writing is poetic as much as it is watching an ice pick work through a block of ice. The structure was also interesting. Big paragraphs, Lots of one lines. Not many chapters. This book is also not politically correct yet has a purpose as well.

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. This is such a fascinating book about a writer named Paul who writes one extremely popular novel and then doesn’t publish for decades. What Paul has done since is leave his first wife and two daughters and married a rich and wildly controlling woman named Cherry. The story is mostly told from the point of Mona, an aspiring actress and playwright that Paul left behind. Mona is constantly drawn to and held off of her father’s affections. In a typical scenario, Mona becomes Paul’s confidant about his affair and then when the affair is exposed, Paul is somehow forgiven, while Mona is banished for keeping everything a secret. The story covers decades of loves and betrayals as everyone spins in and out of Paul’s orbit.