The Good Daughters

The Good Daughters
By Joyce Maynard (278 pages)
Published by William Marrow & Company
Bookish rating: 3

Maynard is not a bad writer. In fact, she has some interesting turns of phrase, gets at the heart of farming, and covers a lot of ground in a pretty readable way.

Oh, but I have some quibbles. For starters, the Big Fat Secret is so freaking obvious that it gets tiresome waiting 278 pages for the characters to figure it out themselves. And it's SO anticlimactic when they do.

Premise: Two "birthday sisters" are born on the same day in the same hospital in rural New Hampshire and their lives get strangely (or, um, not) linked thereafter. Exactly. Now YOU know what the Big Fat Secret is, don't you?

And so we cross about 60 painful, long years. And 278 pages.

Quibble #2: The story is told in the alternating viewpoints of the girls, Ruth and Dana. I found the constant switching jarring, probably because the author was clearly more interested in Ruth's story than Dana's. And I was, too. I think this affected the plotting, which seemed rushed, direction-less, and never ending, all at once.

Perhaps in an effort to make Dana "interesting," Dana is a lesbian. In one of my big pet peeves of current lit depicting same-sex relationships, Maynard has Dana fall gloriously in love with the very first lesbian she finds, and their relationship IS PERFECT for the rest of the novel. No fights, no tension, sheer love, they feed each other blueberries and clutch each other during storms and have the very best sex all the freaking time. Yawn. Idealized, one dimensional, uninteresting. Because lesbians are PEOPLE, I'm pretty sure they have disagreements, somebody neglects to pick up her socks from the floor, they don't spend allllllll day making out.

Finally, there's a sense that this story is over told. Like, a few sentence go on a bit too long, a point is made less subtly than I wanted. Not overwritten, per se, but over explained. There's really zero trust in the reader not being an idiot.

Now, this is not a BAD book. It just didn't have enough steam to hold my interest.