The Daughter

The Daughter by Jane Shemilt intrigued me when I read the description. It sounds like a perfect family is destroyed by the disappearance of a girl.  Then the details start emerging.  The perfect family has some issues.  The narrator may not be reliable.  And what happened to Naomi?

Description: Jenny is a successful family doctor, the mother of three great teenagers, married to a celebrated neurosurgeon.

But when her youngest child, fifteen-year-old Naomi, doesn’t come home after her school play, Jenny’s seemingly ideal life begins to crumble. The authorities launch a nationwide search with no success. Naomi has vanished, and her family is broken.

As the months pass, the worst-case scenarios—kidnapping, murder—seem less plausible. The trail has gone cold. Yet for a desperate Jenny, the search has barely begun. More than a year after her daughter’s disappearance, she’s still digging for answers—and what she finds disturbs her. Everyone she’s trusted, everyone she thought she knew, has been keeping secrets, especially Naomi. Piecing together the traces her daughter left behind, Jenny discovers a very different Naomi from the girl she thought she’d raised.

I don't want to say too much about the book because it's hard to not give away the tiny details that are slowly given to you as read.  The book alternates between the time period of Naomi's disappearance and a year later. 

You really are wondering what has happened to this girl until the very last page.  There are small hints at what might have happened, who might be responsible and what not littered throughout but no until the very last is there somewhat of a conclusion.  And even then it still leaves a few lingering questions.  It's definitely not neatly wrapped up ending.  And that's all I'm going to say about that.  But, if you read it and want to discuss it, I'd be glad too. ;)

I thought it was interesting the more the other characters interact with the narrator, you start to begin to wonder if she is a good parent or if her children are that horrid of people or if she may or may not be giving all the details about herself honestly.

I'd really recommend this if you like books that aren't exactly what they appear.

Do you like reading happy books or books that are emotionally heavy? Do you find that characters are attracted to other characters that help them frequently in books? Does this happen in real life? What is a recent book that you'd recommend?

I received this book from TLC Book Tours but all thoughts and opinions are my own.