Somebody Else's Daughter
A Novel
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
A taut, complex psychological thriller from the author of The Doctor's Wife
Like The Doctor's Wife - which The Boston Globe called "a compelling read"-Somebody Else's Daughter is a literary page-turner peopled with fascinating and disturbing characters. In the idyllic Berkshires, at the prestigious Pioneer School, there are dark secrets that threaten to come to light.
Willa Golding has been brought up by her adoptive parents in elegant prosperity, but they have fled a mysterious and shameful past. Her biological father, a failing writer and former drug addict, needs to see the daughter he abandoned, and in order to do so, he gains a teaching position at Pioneer School. A feminist sculptor initiates a reckless affair, the Pioneer students live in a world to which adults turn a blind eye, and the headmaster's wife is busy keeping her husband's current indiscretions well hidden. Building to a breathtaking collision between two fathers (biological and adoptive), Somebody Else's Daughter is both a suspenseful thriller and a probing study of richly conflicted characters in emotional turmoil.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A surfeit of characters and subplots weigh down Brundage's overwrought second novel (after 2005's The Doctor's Wife). Seventeen years after San Francisco heroin junkies Nate and his then wife gave up their infant daughter, Willa, for adoption to a wealthy couple in Stockbridge, Mass., Nate has cleaned up his act and landed a job as a writing instructor at Pioneer, the elite private school Willa attends in the Berkshires. Everyone has something to hide: the head of Pioneer is stuck in a loveless marriage with his mentally unstable wife; Willa's adoptive father owns a lucrative porn studio. Willa grapples with peer pressure and her feelings for Teddy Squire, the school's newest bad boy, while Nate falls for Teddy's sculptor mother. As tensions near the boiling point, past indiscretions and long-buried secrets threaten to spill over and ruin the superficially idyllic community. Though the ingredients exist for a powerful drama, readers will be disappointed when the suspense fizzles early on and never reignites. 4-city author tour.
