Somebody Else’s Daughter book review

July 30, 2009 - By Paula

Somebody Else’s Daughter, by Elizabeth Brundage, caught my eye at the London public library several months ago but I was too busy to read it then, so when I spied it again at Indigo on sale and in paperback I was one happy camper.

Book also available on Amazon – BUY NOW LINK – > Somebody Else’s Daughter

Now I am a busy gal and is super selective these days about what she reads so I applied my three tests of whether a book is worthy of my time and this one won them all.

Table of Contents

Is this Book Worth My Time Test

Test one: is the title snappy? This title caught my eye for its obvious adoption reference.
Test two: does the blurb on the back peak my interest and flesh out the title image planted in my mind? Yes, it did.
Test three: Am I hooked quickly by the first page? Well, needless to say this book passed all three tests.

Somebody Else’s Daughter begins in the summer of 1989 with two drifters and drug addicts Nate and Cat living in San Francisco in what can only be described as squalor. Cat is ill with what will later be revealed as HIV, the eventual cause of her death.

Chapter 1 and the Hook

The first chapter of the book is Nate and Cat preparing to relinquish their infant daughter, Willa. It is bittersweet and lovely and the emotions ring so true that it’s obvious the author has profound insight into the complicated topic of adoption.

The Narrator

Nate is the narrator of the first chapter, a good-bye letter written to his daughter, child he relinquishes physically but can never let go of emotionally. It is the explanation of her beginning, to be read privately when she is older.

“The woman who would become your mother ran over with the umbrella, her blue eyes filling with tears. I could see she wanted you like nothing she’d ever wanted before. I could see a lot of things about her in that single moment. I could tell she had suffered in her life and that you were a gift to her.”

The New Family

This is not a book for the faint of heart or the prudish. There are moments that read like soft core porn. In fact as Somebody Else’s Daughter progresses, the author slowly reveals the adoptive father of Willa is anything but perfect, an adulterer who made his fortune through making porn films with his brother.

A Novel Fictional Depiction of Adoptive Parents

At first I was taken aback by this, but frankly it’s refreshing in some ways to read a portrayal of adoptive parents that paint them neither as saints nor as cold-hearted abusive people. These two are abundantly human.

The Evidence

As Joe muses: “on the day they’d adopted her he’d made a promise to himself that he’d never leave his wife. It didn’t seem right to adopt a baby and then get divorced – looking back on it he saw the delicate intricacy of such a promise and now he’d come to a point in his life where he questioned his ability to keep it. Regular people got divorced all the time, he told himself. Just because they’d adopted a child didn’t mean they loved her any more or less – and it didn’t mean they were any better than the next person – or worse for that matter. People were flawed..”

Overall Impressions

Despite the graphic sexual content I adore this book for its amazing treatment of the adoption theme. The adoption terms and references are always sensitive and accurate. People and characters here are flawed and that quite frankly is more realistic than most fictional character studies out there.

Somebody Else’s Daughter is a bit heartbreaking but also a refreshing take on adoption.