As soon as I started reading O’Clover’s The Someday Daughter, I knew that I'll like it. I could tell that this was going to be a book with some weight to it; a novel that examined life and relationships through the eyes of an emotionally conflicted teenage girl with the gravitas they deserve. YA fiction has unfortunately, too often, taken a turn for the worse as of late, and often feels as if it is being written with an agenda in mind. The Someday Daughter takes me back to the YA fiction we were getting 10-15 years ago - a time when novels dealt with teens grappling with authentic and relatable emotions and relationships. This book is purely about a complicated mother-daughter relationship, the pressures of going to college and being a perfectionist at the same time, and figuring out love for the first time. These are all things most teenagers face, making this story accessible, but O’Clover has also made her novel intriguing by having her main character play out these feelings with an unwanted spotlight overhead.
Overall I loved it would definitely recommend.

What a beautiful, emotional ride! The many relationships in this book were woven together with their own complexities really well, and I found myself rooting for the MC and LI all the way. The mental health rep was raw and believable. I’m forever an Ellen O’Clover stan!

This was such a beautiful story. I am loving branching out of my normal reads and finding new authors to enjoy.
I will say that it took me awhile to get into this one. I was a bit slow to connect to the characters. But once I did I couldn’t put it down, and the ending. Oh my gosh. So good.

I love the FMC, Audrey, and related to her so much throughout. Seeing her personal growth and her relationships shift and change was so enjoyable and written so well.

This is a coming of age, learning how to say no, working through life when things don’t go according to plan, figuring out who she is story with some romance and family drama sprinkled throughout. It is a YA, which I am learning that I love, and I’d definitely recommend this one!

Thank you @NetGalley for the opportunity to read this!

Ellen O'Clover, at two books in, is so deeply underrated. Her books are reminiscent of Sarah Dessen or Morgan Matson or Rachel Lynn Solomon. Just all the best YA coming of age ladies, while bringing something fresh. Her characters are more complex, and she manages to balance all the complications of teenage girl-dom well, with nuance and so much care. This one follows Audrey, who is forced to spend her last summer before college on a book tour with her psychotherapist mother, a group of quirky interns and a young doctor who will guide her in some pre-college work. Despite the extensive cast of characters, no one feels underdeveloped. Audrey's love interest, Silas, is the standout, but her mom and the other interns are great too. Also, I'm such a sucker for a teenage girl learning to loosen up while traveling, and this does that so perfectly. I just really adored Audrey's moments of walking barefoot and dancing at the honky-tonk.

My one minor complaint is that I wish we had just one more big heart to heart between Audrey and her mother. Much of the book is about their complicated relationship, and I think one more conversation could've wrapped it all up nicely. That being said, it felt realistic to how mothers and daughters truly are, which I liked.

Ultimately, this was just a nice reminder as to why I love this genre and these sort of books. Teenage girls are truly so lucky to have this and titles like it. I am excited to recommend Ellen O'Clover's work to so many teens.

This book has an interesting premise so I was intrigued to see where it would go. I thought it was pretty slow to get going so it did take me a while to get into it, but once I did it was a good read.

There's some good mental health rep in this book which was great to see! However, I felt like the story jumped around quite a lot and I wanted more from some aspects which were skipped over, and then less of some areas that were focused on more extensively.

I also worked out the twist fairly early on but if I hadn't that would have been a nice addition.

I really enjoyed this book once it got going. The first half was a little slow however the plot twist!!!

I would be very keen to read more by this author.

The perennially conflicted mother-daughter relationship is a tale as old as time, and a rite of passage that many of us go through … and are still combating well into adulthood. Which is what makes Ellen O’Clover’s The Someday Daughter such an important and relatable book for teenage & young adult girls.

O’Clover’s new novel follows Audrey, the eponymous someday daughter of Camilla, a self-help guru and therapist who became wildly famous after she penned a book, Letters to My Someday Daughter when she was just 24 years old, long before Audrey was even born. Audrey is now here and a teen, and has spent her entire life in the shadow of her mother’s success, labeled time and time again as the “someday daughter.” The weight of being Camilla’s daughter is crushing, and Audrey knows something that no one else does - that being the daughter of the woman with all of the answers is not everything it is cracked up to be.

Audrey has big plans to be a doctor, and has her sights set on spending her summer before college in an intensive pre-med training program, but soon finds her hopes dashed when her mother insists she join her on a cross-country tour to celebrate Letters to My Someday Daughter’s 25th anniversary. There is nothing Audrey would rather do less than spend time with her mother on stage in front of thousands of adoring fans, answering awkward questions with a fake smile plastered across her face.

However, this will prove to be a life-altering summer for Audrey as she begins to learn more about her mother and her choices … and herself. As Audrey preps to head out to college, the stakes are high - this suffocating summer will either make or break her relationship with Camilla. But which will it be?

As soon as I started reading O’Clover’s The Someday Daughter, I knew that I had a winner in my hands. Poignant and reflective right off the bat, I could tell that this was going to be a book with some weight to it; a novel that examined life and relationships through the eyes of an emotionally conflicted teenage girl with the gravitas they deserve. YA fiction has unfortunately, too often, taken a turn for the worse as of late, and often feels as if it is being written with an agenda in mind. The Someday Daughter takes me back to the YA fiction we were getting 10-15 years ago - a time when novels dealt with teens grappling with authentic and relatable emotions and relationships. This book is purely about a complicated mother-daughter relationship, the pressures of going to college and being a perfectionist at the same time, and figuring out love for the first time. These are all things most teenagers face, making this story accessible, but O’Clover has also made her novel intriguing by having her main character play out these feelings with an unwanted spotlight overhead.

Recommended to teenage girls just embarking on their life’s journey - this novel would make a great high school graduation present for all of the avid readers out there!

Couldn’t ever get fully invested in this book. I didn’t find myself connecting with the characters and it dragged a bit.

Thank you NetGalley and HarperCollins for the Advanced Reader Copy!

OOF. This book hits hard (in all the right places!). This Contemporary YA novel follows Audrey St. Vrain, daughter of Camilla St. Vrain who is a famous self-help author, during the summer before her freshman year of college. Audrey had big plans to have a super productive summer by attending a prestigious summer premed program which would set her up for success in college, but she ends up getting roped into joining a summer book tour to promote the 25th anniversary of her mother's book, "Letters to My Someday Daughter," and confront her strained relationship with her. After having to endure the stresses of being in the spotlight and answering questions about her and her mother despite not having the picture-perfect relationship that her mother always boasts about, Audrey finds herself having to acknowledge difficult truths about herself and her family.

While this book was slow to start, it got me in the second half, and that twist shocked me to my core! I audibly gasped! At times Audrey's stubbornness was eye-roll worry and occasionally got on my nerves, but I'm also a 25-year-old who has gone through a lot of therapy! And to be fair, I very much acted like Audrey when I was her age. All the other characters were lovely! Except for Silas, Sadie, and Camilla, the side characters did feel a tad one-noted, but they were still a joy to read and provided a nice comic relief. There is a small bit of romance in this book, BUT "The Someday Daughter" is far beyond a standard YA romance novel. At its core, this novel is about Audrey and her mental health struggles and navigating her relationship with her mother. It's incredibly written and is so beautiful in a raw and vulnerable way. It is worth a read if you are looking for something fresh in the YA world!

I really liked this sweet read by Ellen. It was a completely unexpected twist between mother and daughter on the road with the book tour. I enjoyed the writing flow and all of the characters.

This was my first read by Ellen O'Clover, and it did not disappoint. I love a flawed main character who is not always making the best decisions, and that's exactly how I saw Audrey in this story. I loved the framing of a famous mom and her daughter reluctantly joining her summer book tour. It's a great setup for forced proximity, and it leads to all kinds of revelations. I also appreciate how the author portrayed Audrey's struggles with anxiety and how it was shown on the page. Though the relationship with Silas felt a bit like instalove, it was also understandable given the context of the story. Overall a great, relatable story with lots of nuance.

The Someday Daughter by Ellen O'Clover is a beautifully written story centred around mother-daughter relationships. Following the daughter of a self-help author, this one contains a main character who transforms throughout the book and a complicated relationship between a mother and a daughter. Fans of more emotional contemporaries with complex characters will enjoy this one.

As the daughter of the author of a bestselling self-help book called Letters to My Someday Daughter that encourages women to treat themselves with kindness--to treat themselves the way they would treat their daughters--Audrey has a lot to live up to. While the book's readers would say she has the perfect mother, in reality, Audrey doesn't feel connected to her mother at all since she has been sent off to boarding school since age 11. However, to celebrate the book's 25th anniversary, Audrey's mom is heading on tour and asks Audrey to abandon her plans and join her for the summer. As the tour progresses, both women must get to know each other again outside of their Letters to My Someday Daughter identities and learn more about themselves along the way.

I really enjoyed Audrey's character and the ways she changes throughout the book. I really felt for her since she feels feels more like a promotional tool than a daughter for her mother who is barely in her life and deals with pressure to live up to the version of herself that her mother has built a career on. At the beginning of the book, Audrey has carefully made plans to become a doctor and land the perfect summer premed program and is determined to separate herself from everything related to her mother's book. However, when she realizes that life doesn't always go according to plan, she must learn to become more flexible, and I enjoyed watching her as she grows.

My favourite part about this book is Audrey's relationship with her mother. It is difficult for Audrey to pretend that her mother is the perfect parent when they're not close at all, and I loved the opportunity the book tour presents for them to finally talk and try and mend their relationship. Both characters deal with their own struggles, and their complicated relationship is well-written.

The Someday Daughter by Ellen O'Clover is a complex story focused on fame and mother-daughter relationships. I enjoyed the main character's growth throughout the book and the way her relationship with her mother develops. This is a thought-provoking read that fans of more character-driven books will enjoy.

Thank you netgalley and harper teen. I read the authors debut and immediately added this book to tbr I grabbed the audio and while listening my head swivled as I was not sure I was hearing it correctly. I found these characters so incredibly messy it was jolting to hear someone in the book talk about an I dollar coffee.... good coming of age book. Hope the next is another home run

3.5/5

going into this book, i knew there was a high chance i was going to like this book. i’d read o’clover’s debut last year and fell in love with her storytelling. what i wasn’t prepared for was just how much more this book would impact me.

audrey feels so personal and real to me, her fears, her hopes and dreams are so like my own. i kin her so much that it probably says a bit too much about me… but uh… let’s ignore that for now!

no, but in all seriousness. after finishing this book, it’s taken me about a week to actually be able to write this review. i’ve had to sit and process through my emotions about audrey’s story. how much i’ve learned from her growth that i definitely should apply into my own life. but also, you could easily add her to my list of characters i just want to give the biggest hug. tell her that it will be alright.

a lot of this story focuses on her relationship between her and her mom, processing their estranged relationship through the book her mom wrote all those years ago. but we also see audrey struggle with massive fear of failure. a fear to step outside of her plan. this book gets tough. audrey really struggles the entire way with her internal identity the whole way through. slowly questioning many of her choices. and while i’m not easily one to cry while reading, this one got me close a few times. but hey, i’m a sucker for a sad story about a teen prepping for college, apparently??

and while i know audrey as a MC won’t appeal to so many readers, i do hope it finds its readership. audrey isn’t chatty, or bubbly, or really even nice most of the time. she’s quiet, introspective and doesn’t always make the right choice. but i love her so so dearly. and if i were her, it’d take a lot more for me to forgive her mom, to be honest. so she’s already got that on me.

i’m urging you, if you like a story about complicated, messy familial relationships. a teen girl whose plan gets upturned the summer before her first year at college. please go pick this up. it will be worth your time!!

I saw a quote once that said "Be kind to your parents, it is their first time living too", which 1. hit really hard and 2. I was reminded of by this book.

In "The Someday Daughter" we follow Audrey, who grew up in the shadow of her mother. Her mom, Camilla, is a best selling author of the book "Letters to My Someday Daughter", where she wrote several letters addressed to a hypothetical daughter, before Audrey was even born. So Audrey not only grew in the shadow of her mom but with a specific set of expectations laid out in her mother's book.

Now all grown up Audrey realizes that she might not want to be the person, her mom wrote about in those letters. When Audrey is dragged on a book tour to commemorate the anniversary of "Letters to my Someday Daughter" instead of living out her dream of going into a pre-med program with her boyfriend, her world slowly starts to implode and she has to challenge every single expectation of herself around her, including her own.

I personally really loved Ellen O'Clovers debut "Seven Percent of Ro Devereux", so I had really high expectations going into this book. I initially thought the romance would play a bigger role, but I was actually quite happy that it didn't. I feel like this book really encapsulates girlhood and the grief but also joy that seems so omnipresent in every mother-daughter-relationship.

The discussion of anxiety and letting go of past versions of yourself and those around you made me feel all the feels and the romance aspects of the story only added to my experience. If you are wanting to read this book I would advise to really stick with Audrey. I say this because Audrey's character development did feel a little bit slow and I didn't like her in the first 40% of the book AT ALL. I say you have to stick with her because the resolution of the plot and her character development is really beautiful and with it in the end.

i read this author’s debut last year and really enjoyed it, so i was disappointed that the different plotlines in this one felt disconnected. the premise of the MC’s mother being an influencer and how that affected her life didn’t feel as detailed as it needed to be to carry the entire book. thank you to harpercollins for this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

This was a great coming-of-age story about a mother-daughter duo who both ultimately have regrets and pieces of themselves they are keeping close to their hearts. Audrey has lived her entire life according to her mother's expectations as well as all of the adoring fans who have read her book. Stuffed into a picture-perfect box of how their relationship is nothing short of perfect she is stifled by Camila and all the thoughts and emotions they do not say. Camila lives her life flawlessly and boasts about the Letters to her Someday Daughter that she wrote before she ever had a child. So when her daughter came along her path was already clearly written.

Audrey was all set to create her own bubble during a medical internship that was disrupted when her mother decided she was to travel on a book tour with her during the summer. It is the single most annoying thing her mother has done but ultimately sheds light on the silent pain the duo has been experiencing all these years of living up to unrealistic expectations of one another and from the shadow of her mother's self-help book. She learns many things about herself along the journey as well as begins to let go of the weight of the book she has always felt. Opens her heart to get to know her mother and learn some of the secrets along the way. I enjoyed reading this book and thought the struggles were very realistic. As the only child, she was often with adults so the maturing quickly aspect is something I am sure others can identify in either as a firstborn or only child. Seeing another side to her mom helped to humanize the experiences and show another side to the creation of the self-help book that propelled her into a sort of guru in the parenting community.

I have really mixed feelings about this. I loved listening to the audiobook; it was easy to listen to and intriguing. I thought it was an interesting look into all the different relationships we can have, such as…
- Mother/daughter
- daughter and absent dad
- the summer after high school couple
- the old lover and the new flame
- student/professor and how professors are multi faceted beings

I liked the story, the romance, the depth. But I hated the main characters. Audrey was whiney and immature. Camila was an asshole. I couldn’t relate to either of them, and I wasn’t overly impressed with their growth.

Audrey is on tour with her author mother this summer celebrating the 25th anniversary of her book, Letters to My Someday Daughter. Audrey had a plan this summer and it wasn't upending her life to go all over the country with a mom who only wants to spend time with her for show. She was accepted into a program that would help her in college as premed. When her mom cancels the deposit, and the school fills her slot, she has no choice but to come along.
Audrey doesn't understand why her mother wants her with her on this tour, but she is bound and determined to not let it affect her studies. When she meets the interns, specifically Silas, she has a feelings all of her carefully laid plans would go out the window.
This was a beautiful story about communication, or lack there of, a mother's love and a girl who has to find her place in life. Audrey is rigid and when things don't go as planned she has a hard time dealing with what to do next. This summer is about to get her completely out of her comfort zone and it's in the best way.
There was even a big twist that, while I did see coming, was still super emotional and had me tearing up at the end. I loved every character in this book.
Thanks to Ellen O'Clover, Netgalley and Harper Collins for an early copy.

3.5 stars

Thank you so much for the publisher for the free eARC!

After Seven Percent of Ro Devereux I knew I have to read Ellen O’Clover’s next book too. It was just as entertaining as the author’s previous book, but this one was a bit deeper than what I expected. I enjoyed it, but there were a few parts that I did not like at all. I’ll talk about those, and since they are spoilers I’ll do a warning before.

Audrey’s mother wrote Letters to My Someday Daughter years before her birth. The book shaped both Audrey’s life and her relationship with her mother. For the 25th anniversary the publisher and Camilla decided to do an 8-week long US promo tour. And Audrey is expected to be there, even though she already had plans for the summer, attending a prestigious premed program.

I wanted to give Camilla the benefit of doubt, but after one point I no longer cared about her reasons.


SPOILERS!

She cancelled Audrey’s tuition for the premed program without her knowledge/approval. I’m sorry, but no, you don’t do this to your own daughter, especially when you know she wanted this more than anything. You don’t make decisions for your adult daughter behind her back, this is just unacceptable. After this move, Camilla was lost for me, I didn’t care about her reasoning. I actually had to stop reading, I was so mad.

SPOILERS OVER!


I loved the interns, Mick was the kind of friend I’d love to have, Silas was... let’s just say I shipped him and Audrey from the first page. But while I loved the boys I had issues with Cleo. She seemed the kind of person who can’t accept that others might enjoy different things in life and this does not sit well with me. So what if someone rather spends their Saturday night in the comfort of a hotel room studying than going out to a club? What if someone isn’t a dog person and doesn’t want to be near one? Does it hurt you in some way that different people live their lives in different ways?

SPOILERS!


And when she (and also Mick followed her) grabbed a bite from Audrey’s food without asking her permission. I understand that she, Mick and Silas are longtime friends, but Audrey knows them for less than a month at that point. They are basically still strangers at the time! And no, you don’t eat from someone’s food without asking them first. For me this showed how much Cloe doesn’t care about Audrey’s boundaries.

SPOILERS OVER!


Puddles was the best character in the whole book, and I’m not a dog person. She was just adorable.

Audrey’s anxiety and perfectionism got displayed throughout the whole book, and I loved when she confessed to her mother. She has a lot to learn, but that scene was heartbreaking.

Did I see the big plot twist coming? I had my guesses and theories, but somehow I missed the connection between them. Still, this made the last chapters even more exciting for me.
In conclusion, I had issues with the story, but despite them I really enjoyed it and I’m looking forward to read more from Ellen O’Clover.