Book Review: Somebody Else's Daughter by Elizabeth Brundage

An idyllic Berkshires-based second-tier prep school, failing marriages, disaffected teenagers on drugs, infidelity, adoption - the most banal of plot devices, and yet, in Somebody Else's Daughter, Elizabeth Brundage makes it almost work because of her incredibly gorgeous prose, her precise and loving attention to detail, and a host of beautifully drawn but completely believable characters, all of whom command our attention.

The book’s powerhouse beginning sets up the premise: Nate, a drug-addicted father, and Cat, his even more addicted girlfriend, have recently given birth to Willa, a baby girl whom they cannot even begin to care for, as much as they love her and wish to be able to be parents. Nate’s description of his lover is simply divine: “She didn’t have any tits, so skinny you could push her over with one finger, and her nose running snot and the woozy yellow eyes of an addict. But lips warm like a good supper somebody makes you out of kindness, when you haven’t eaten for days, and you’ve never tasted food so good, and the felling in your belly of being full, like when you were a kid.”

Too young, too selfish, and far too hooked on their own pleasure, Nate and Cat decide to give the child up in a private adoption. The mother, infected with HIV, dies as soon as she hands the baby over (“You can smell death on your woman, like grease…”); the father flees, but only after sitting in the car completing a letter to his daughter that he hopes her adoptive parents will allow her to read on her sixteenth birthday.

The novel then picks up seventeen years later in the same Berkshires town, when, Claire, a young artist for whom “(t)he years had piled up like dull books” and Teddy, her brilliant but troubled son, come to say goodbye to her father and learn they have been bequeathed his house; and, when Nate, now clean and sober and an English teacher, takes a year-long position at the Pioneer (described as a place where the parents did not want their children to suffer “and were willing to pay top dollars so they wouldn’t have to.”), primarily so he can get a glimpse of his daughter and see how she turned out. An old childhood friend, whose husband is head of the school, and Willa’s adoptive parents, round out the cast of main characters, although there are some appropriately shady secondary characters that help move the plot along.

Article Author: Lisa Solod Warren

Short story writer and essayist Lisa Solod Warren has been published in a wide variety of literary journals, magazines, newspapers, and anthologies. She is the editor of Desire: Women Write About Wanting (Seal Press, 2007). She blogs at opensalon.com and redroom.com. …

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