Thursday, August 23, 2007

The Mistress’s Daughter by AM Holmes


My Rating: 6/10

Again, this is one of those books I read because it had good reviews. It is the first book I ever read of the author AM Holmes. I like her writing style, but I would say the novel took an uninteresting turn in middle and I lost interest.

The novel is about an adopted woman and how she copes with her birth-parents sudden appearance. AM Holmes was given up for adoption before she was born. Her biological mother was 22 year old single woman who was having an affair with a much older man with children and a family of his own. The novel is a riveting story of what happened when her birth parents came looking for her.

Well, I gave it a 5 rating mainly because in the second half of the novel, Holmes goes on to describe her quest to find more about her birth parents and it becomes a tedious process to go through all the details. I lost my interest then. I would have liked to read more about what was going on in her mind and life then and mere process of search. I would say it is more of a memoir than a novel.


Excerpt from the memoir:

I grew up furious. I feared that there was something about me, some defect of birth that made me repulsive, unlovable

Every nuance, every detail means something. I am like an amnesiac being awakened. Things I know about myself, things that exist without language, my hardware, my mental firing patterns — parts of me that are fundamentally, inexorably me are being echoed on the other end, confirmed as a DNA match. It is not an entirely comfortable sensation.

"Tell me about you — who are you?" she asks.

I tell her that I live in New York, I am a writer, I have a dog. No more or less.
She tells me that she loves New York, that her father used to come to New York and would always return with presents from FAO Schwarz. She tells me how much she loved her father, who died of a heart attack when she was seven because "he liked rich food."
This causes an immediate pain in my chest: the idea that I might die of a heart attack early in life, that I now know I need to be careful, that the things I enjoy most are dangerous
.


You can buy the book here.

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