‘My Darling Daughter’ by JP Delaney

Published by Quercus Books,
15 September 2022.
ISBN: 978-1-52942-771-4 (HB)

Susie and Gabe Thompson are professional musicians.  The couple, having survived the excesses of being young rock stars, are settling gently into middle-age and planning to start a family.  Then, Susie receives a text from fifteen-year-old Anna, and their world is turned upside down.  Anna, it appears, may be Susie’s long-lost daughter.

Susie was twenty years old and just breaking into the music world, when she conceived and bore a baby girl, Sky.  The infant was adopted, but Susie has long chided herself for having been parted from her baby.  Sky was renamed Anna by her adoptive parents Ian and Jenny Mulcahy, and it breaks Susie’s heart to learn that her daughter is now “desperately unhappy” living with them.  With Gabe’s tentative blessing, she contacts the teenager, and they meet up.

The bond between mother and daughter proves to be formidable and it is not long before Anna leaves her home of the past thirteen years to move in with the Thompsons.  Gabe has reservations about the speed of events and is concerned at Susie’s reluctance to set boundaries for the teenager.  He tries to see things from Anna’s point of view and to understand Susie’s remorse but finds himself increasingly excluded from their confidences.  Relationships are strained even further when events from the past threaten to destroy the professional, as well as personal, lives of the Thompsons.  This, though, is just the beginning…

It is the complexity of the characters that primarily drives the thrilling element of the story.  Each of the three main protagonists are revealed through first person narratives, giving different perspectives as the story unfolds.  These points of view are handled with skill and subtlety, and it becomes increasingly difficult to know whose voice, if any, can be trusted as the characters endure the ups, downs, twists, and turns of this rollercoaster of a novel. 

My Darling Daughter is carefully plotted and beautifully written.  It explores sensitive issues such as child abuse, adoption, infertility, drug culture and domestic violence, through a story that is essentially about families, and their potential to harm as well as help, torture as well as nurture.  It is refreshing that the brilliant JP Delaney does not dilute this cracker of a story by neatly tying up its loose ends.  There is, however, a resolution and, perhaps a suggestion of more to come?
Highly recommended
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Reviewer: Dot Marshall-Gent

JP Delaney  is the pseudonym of an author who has previously written
award-winning fiction under other names.

 www.jpdelaney.co.uk

Dot Marshall-Gent worked in the emergency services for twenty years first as a police officer, then as a paramedic and finally as a fire control officer before graduating from King’s College, London as a teacher of English in her mid-forties.  She completed a M.A. in Special and Inclusive Education at the Institute of Education, London and now teaches part-time and writes mainly about educational issues.  Dot sings jazz and country music and plays guitar, banjo and piano as well as being addicted to reading mystery and crime fiction.