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simonlorden 's review for:
Not Her Daughter
by Rea Frey
I received an ARC through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Sarah Walker’s mother abandoned her when she was a child - she simply left one day and never came back, and this was only the culmination of a tense, dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship. So when she sees a little girl, Emma being mistreated by her biological mother, Sarah makes a decision to take Emma and run.
I have to admit that I didn’t enjoy Not Her Daughter at first. It was necessary to show the mistreatment and neglect of Emma to “justify” Sarah taking her from her family, but it was horrible to read about -- and it was almost worse to read about Amy, the biological mother’s life, body image, self-esteem and how having children changed all this. As someone who doesn’t want children, reading about Amy and her resentment towards her life was like looking into a possible future that I don’t want to end up in.
This book is told from two POVs (Sarah and Amy) as well as three timelines: before, during and after the kidnapping. The beginning of the book mostly had “before” and “during” scenes, while later it switched to having mostly “after” scenes with the occasional flashback. For me, reading the “after” scenes was not only easier, but also much more interesting, which is why I enjoyed the book more and more as it went on. Seeing all the things Sarah did to evade capture was scary, but also exciting and interesting.
Not Her Daughter raises very interesting questions about morality that there are no easy or correct answers to. In fact, the copy I read actually had discussion questions in the back that explicitly listed several of these. Was Sarah’s decision justified? Could Amy and her husband have been happier if they never had kids? What will Emma think of all this once she grows up and understands what happened? (And one question that wasn’t asked: what the hell is Sarah going to tell her family and friends about what happened? Will she just never talk to them again?) Even after reading the book, I couldn’t give one definite answer to most of the discussion questions.
What I really liked that in the beginning of the book, we start out with a family of miserable people: Emma is miserable, Amy is miserable, Amy’s husband is miserable, and the only reason their second child isn’t miserable is that he’s too young to really understand what’s going on in his family. Whether Sarah is justified in kidnapping Emma or not, in a weird way this disappearance moves the other three family members out of this miserable state and allows them to change their lives in a direction that might bring them more happiness in the long-run. I’m sure they will never forget Emma, but now they have a chance to move on from this.
This book was very different from what I usually read, but I really enjoyed it once I got through the difficult first part. I also felt like both Sarah’s mother and Amy’s story showed how women and families can end up if they are pressured into having children even if they don’t want to, which is a really important topic.
Sarah Walker’s mother abandoned her when she was a child - she simply left one day and never came back, and this was only the culmination of a tense, dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship. So when she sees a little girl, Emma being mistreated by her biological mother, Sarah makes a decision to take Emma and run.
I have to admit that I didn’t enjoy Not Her Daughter at first. It was necessary to show the mistreatment and neglect of Emma to “justify” Sarah taking her from her family, but it was horrible to read about -- and it was almost worse to read about Amy, the biological mother’s life, body image, self-esteem and how having children changed all this. As someone who doesn’t want children, reading about Amy and her resentment towards her life was like looking into a possible future that I don’t want to end up in.
This book is told from two POVs (Sarah and Amy) as well as three timelines: before, during and after the kidnapping. The beginning of the book mostly had “before” and “during” scenes, while later it switched to having mostly “after” scenes with the occasional flashback. For me, reading the “after” scenes was not only easier, but also much more interesting, which is why I enjoyed the book more and more as it went on. Seeing all the things Sarah did to evade capture was scary, but also exciting and interesting.
Not Her Daughter raises very interesting questions about morality that there are no easy or correct answers to. In fact, the copy I read actually had discussion questions in the back that explicitly listed several of these. Was Sarah’s decision justified? Could Amy and her husband have been happier if they never had kids? What will Emma think of all this once she grows up and understands what happened? (And one question that wasn’t asked: what the hell is Sarah going to tell her family and friends about what happened? Will she just never talk to them again?) Even after reading the book, I couldn’t give one definite answer to most of the discussion questions.
What I really liked that in the beginning of the book, we start out with a family of miserable people: Emma is miserable, Amy is miserable, Amy’s husband is miserable, and the only reason their second child isn’t miserable is that he’s too young to really understand what’s going on in his family. Whether Sarah is justified in kidnapping Emma or not, in a weird way this disappearance moves the other three family members out of this miserable state and allows them to change their lives in a direction that might bring them more happiness in the long-run. I’m sure they will never forget Emma, but now they have a chance to move on from this.
This book was very different from what I usually read, but I really enjoyed it once I got through the difficult first part. I also felt like both Sarah’s mother and Amy’s story showed how women and families can end up if they are pressured into having children even if they don’t want to, which is a really important topic.