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It's early morning and I'm sitting here wondering where you are, hoping you're all right.
A fight, ended by a slap, sends Elizabeth out the door of her Baton Rouge home on the eve of her fifteenth birthday. Her mother, Laura, is left to fret and worry—and remember. Wracked with guilt as she awaits Liz's return, Laura begins a letter to her daughter, hoping to convey "everything I've always meant to tell you but never have."
In her painfully candid confession, Laura shares memories of her own troubled adolescence in rural Louisiana, growing up in an intensely conservative household. She recounts her relationship with a boy she loved despite her parents' disapproval, the fateful events that led to her being sent away to a strict Catholic boarding school, the personal tragedy brought upon her by the Vietnam War, and, finally, the meaning of the enigmatic tattoo below her right hip.
Absorbing and affirming, George Bishop's magnificent debut brilliantly captures a sense of time and place with a distinct and inviting voice. Letter to My Daughter is a heartwrenching novel of mothers, daughters, and the lessons we all learn when we come of age.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
April 12, 2010 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781400196944
- File size: 123268 KB
- Duration: 04:16:48
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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September 28, 2009
This slight and gauzy novel fails to find anything new in the familiar terrain of mothers and their volatile teenage daughters. After Elizabeth storms out of the house in the wake of an argument on her 15th birthday, her mother, Laura, writes her a letter, endeavoring to tell Liz “the truth about how a girl grows up” by recounting her own adolescence. Laura's high school romance with Tim, a poor Cajun boy, is an act of rebellion against her intolerant parents that resulted in her transfer to a Catholic girls' school. Though Laura's relationship is a source of cruel mirth for her classmates, her correspondence with Tim continues, even as Tim ships off to Vietnam and Laura questions her devotion to her long-distance lover. Bishop's debut may be an interesting exercise in writing from the opposite gender's point of view, but most of the novel's insights into the mother-daughter relationship, and into female adolescence, have been explored innumerable times—and in more compelling ways—in countless young adult novels.
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