The Daughter: A Novel by Jane Shemilt

(Thank you to TLC Book Tours and the publisher for providing me with a copy of this book!)

about book:

Jenny is a successful family doctor, the mother of three great teenagers, married to a celebrated neurosurgeon.

But when her youngest child, fifteen-year-old Naomi, doesn’t come home after her school play, Jenny’s seemingly ideal life begins to crumble. The authorities launch a nationwide search with no success. Naomi has vanished, and her family is broken.

As the months pass, the worst-case scenarios—kidnapping, murder—seem less plausible. The trail has gone cold. Yet, for a desperate Jenny, the search has barely begun. More than a year after her daughter’s disappearance, she’s still digging for answers—and what she finds disturbs her. Everyone she’s trusted, everyone she thought she knew, has been keeping secrets, especially Naomi. Piecing together the traces her daughter left behind, Jenny discovers a very different Naomi from the girl she thought she’d raised.

Jenny knows she’ll never be able to find Naomi unless she uncovers the whole truth about her daughter—a twisting, painful journey into the past that will lead to an almost unthinkable revelation. . . .

my thoughts:

A predictable read that fell flat right from the beginning.  Truthfully, I wish that I had DNFed this book - it was that disappointing.  The story basically revolves around Jenny's dogged pursuit for the truth surrounding her daughter's disappearance.  I can dig that. I mean what parent wouldn't want to find out what happened to their kid if suddenly they are gone, right?  However, in this case its pretty obvious that this kid wanted to disappear.  Naomi is an unhappy teen who leads a double life unbeknownst to her parents.  So, as Jenny digs deeper into her daughter's (and family's) life she discovers things that shock her.  Except, they really aren't that shocking - well, maybe except for the gypsies - yep, they are the crowd that Naomi has fallen in with.  Anyhow, as Jenny falls apart, so does her family. A family that was already filled with too many cracks and was pretty much ready to dissolve.  And now that Jenny has finally seen just how bad things are at home, its too late to fix it all.   In the end, Jenny does find out what happened to Naomi, but she is left without her happy reunion. 

Sounds pretty interesting, right? Well, it wasn't.  There were too many cliches thrown in for dramatic effect and the story lines kept getting derailed by red herrings that never quite fit right.  The characters were stereotypical to a tee, which made them rather boring and uninteresting - basically, you didn't care what happened to them.  And the story itself was just too predictable to captivate.  In the end, The Daughter was just not my cup of tea.  However, you should check out what others are saying about this book, because as the saying goes "different strokes for different folks".  So, here's the TLC Book Tour schedule for: The Daughter

Thank you to TLC Book Tours and the publisher for providing me with a copy of this book!