‘The Daisy Children’ Remind Us That We Can’t Outrun Our Past [REVIEW]

Sometimes the untold stories are the ones we need to hear… (Photo by Amy the Nurse, Flickr)

With no job, no baby, a self-centered mother and a husband who is growing increasingly distant, a young woman doesn’t know what direction her life is going to take her. But when she receives news that she’s been named in her grandmother’s will, she makes a journey to the past and learns some important life lessons along the way in Sofia Grant’s The Daisy Children.

William Morrow

Katie Garrett is a mess. She’s been laid off from her job as a designer at Nickell, March & Co. The baby she’s been trying to conceive just isn’t happening. Her apartment is claustrophobic. Her mother is all up in her business. And her grandmother just died. Then there’s the fact that her workaholic husband is always distracted, their love life has become rote, and she has no idea how she is going to tell him any of this.

When she discovers that she’s been named as one of her grandmother’s heirs, she is nonplussed. First of all, she didn’t really know her Grandma Margaret. Second, she has it on pretty good authority (her mom) that the dearly departed didn’t have two pennies to rub together by the end. All the woman had left was an old house in the middle of nowhere, Texas, and that had been let go long before Margaret was put into a nursing facility.

Yet with everything going on in her life, Katie decides to make the trip from Boston to Texas, where she meets her effervescent, if distant, cousin Scarlett. Together, they sort through the remains of a life, going through everything from old photos to letters which have yellowed with time. But within those documents, they begin to piece together their family’s puzzling history, and thereby discover who their grandmother truly was and what exactly happened when a school exploded in New London on March 18, 1937, taking hundreds of children’s lives in the process.

The Daisy Children is one of my favorite kind of novels. It parallels the present with the past until both intersect and help our protagonist make peace with the cards she’s been dealt. In doing so, Grant creates an absorbing story which is both complex and arresting, and which resonates with myriad emotions, filling us with compassion even as it propels us toward hope. As the point of view vacillates between Katie and Margaret’s lives, we discover what makes each of them tick, why they think the way they do, and how that long-ago disaster shaped their lives, whether they realized it or not.

Grant also captures just how consuming grief can be, how everyone processes it in their own time and way, and that there is no right or wrong way to move past it. The only thing that truly heals all of our wounds is time, with a bit of empathy from the people who populate our lives. But we must do the work to get over whatever it is that haunts us. Shrewd and emotionally intelligent, The Daisy Children is a sound reminder that we cannot outrun our past, or even that of our ancestors. We can, however,  learn from those experiences, if we resist the urge to let them define who we become.

Sofia Grant
(Photo by Maddee James)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sofia Grant is the author of 2017’s The Dress in the Window, as well as dozens of other novels for adults and teens that she has written under the name Sophie Littlefield.

Called a “writing machine” by the New York Times and a “master storyteller” by the Midwest Book Review, she has won Anthony and RT Book Awards and been shortlisted for Edgar® , Barry, Crimespree, Macavity, and Goodreads Choice Awards.

With the heart of a homemaker, the curiosity of a cat, and the keen eye of a scout, Sofia works from an urban aerie in Oakland, California.

Readers may visit Sofia at her home on the Web at SofiaGrant.com, like her on Facebook, and follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

THE DAISY CHILDREN
By Sofia Grant
432 pgs. William Morrow. $15.99

Purchase The Daisy Children at one of these fine online retailers: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, HarperCollins, IndieBound, and Powell’s.

The Daisy Children is brought to you in association with TLC Book Tours.