Daughters of the House
by Michele Roberts
Overview
From the Publisher
In an old farmhouse nestled in the rolling, haunted landscape of Normandy, two young cousins, one French, one half-English, grow up surrounded by mysteries. One side of their lives, the innocent one, is filled with love and comforts, the rich, fragrant tastes and smells of the Norman countryside, the nurturing joys of girlish friendship. The other side is dark, intense, and disturbing: a realm of sexual tension, mystic visions, and family guilt that conceals a dark village secret, dating from the German occupation during World War II, whose revelation will bring the cousins painfully together again after a separation of twenty years. It is in these two worlds that the sylph-like Leonie and her voluptuous, ascetic cousin Therese discover the passionate bonds that connect them and the equally fiery conflicts that threaten to tear them apart. A novel infused with the rhythms of pagan and Catholic Normandy, with the ecstasies of Saint Therese, with the lingering, brutal memories of Nazi collaboration in France, Daughters of the House is a hypnotic tale of love and shame, a story whose lyrical elegance and Gothic intensity will echo in the reader's imagination long after the book has been put down.
Library Journal
In this lyrical novel, cousins Therese and Leonie come together and look back on their childhood spent in a small French village just after World War II. Events of the past (the Nazi occupation, the death of Therese's mother, and the mysterious betrayal of a French resistance fighter and a family of Jews who had been hidden in Therese's house) still resonate in their lives. In response, Therese turns to religion, while Leonie devotes herself to the minutiae of an ordinary life. Despite some good writing, the book fails to engage the reader because Roberts, author of several novels and collections of poetry, cannot make up her mind whether it is about adolescent religious fervor (in which case, Ron Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy , Harper, 1991, is much superior) or the treachery of memory. This novel was short-listed for the Booker Prize and won the W.H. Smith Prize for 1992 in Britain. Libraries with large literary fiction collections should consider.-- Nancy Pearl, Washington Center for the Book at the Seattle P . L.
My thoughts
Nancy Pearl's approach to enjoying reading is the Rule of 50 which states "If you still don't like a book after slogging through the first 50 pages, set it aside. If you're more than 50 years old, subtract your age from 100 and only grant it that many pages."
I have invoked the Rule of 50 on this book!
I considered invoking the non-existent Rule of 2. Yes, by page 2 I was wondering what had drawn me to this book. I re-read the summary on the back, I looked at the fairytale picture on the cover, and I started reading again. I seriously considered creating a Rule of 6, however I kept going and actually started getting into the book. Then it got really weird again and I became annoyed. I couldn't stop at Page 50 but I had no trouble at Page 51.
Look, maybe this is a book you'll enjoy, after all, it was a finalist for the Booker Prize. Fiction isn't my preferred reading, and creepy thriller fiction with people throwing up and picking up a knife with thoughts of pushing it into someone's heart doesn't do much for me. And that whole spirit/ghost thing in the beginning of the book was just ... out there.
I'm not going to say this is a bad book because it does indeed have some beautiful writing in it. I'm just saying it's definitely not for me.
Favorite Passage
I'm not sure I have a favorite passage, but the descriptive writing is quite good. For example:
We used to sit up like this when we were young, didn't we? Therese said: talking. We used to tell each other everything. All our secrets.
Did we? Leonie said.
Her silky bulk rolled nearer Therese. She smelled of facecream and flowery scent and cigarettes. She wriggled her shoulders, shifted her legs, put one hand back under her head. With the other she stubbed out her cigarette on the invisible ashtray balanced on the dark bump of her stomach. She waited. She was at home. Therese thought: I haven't, I chose not to, for all those years, I had forgotten.
The pleasure of two heads, close, turned towards each other in the dark. Whispers. Certain confidences could be exchanged only in the friendly night. When you were unembarrassed, more honest. When you couldn't clearly see the other's face but knew, from the tilt of her head, that she was listening. Her mouth and warm breath nearby.
