The Daughters

by Adrienne Celt

Lulu can't sing. Since the traumatic birth of her daughter, the internationally renowned soprano hasn't dared utter a note. She's afraid that her body is too fragile and that she may have lost her talent to a long-dreaded curse afflicting all of the mothers in her family.

When Lulu was a child, her strong-willed grandmother Ada filled her head with fables of the family's enchanted history in the Polish countryside. A fantastical lore took hold—an incantatory mix of young love, desperate hope, and one sinister bargain that altered the family's history forever. Since that fateful pact, Ada tells Lulu, each mother in their family has been given a daughter, but each daughter has exacted an essential cost from her mother.

Ada was the first to recognize young Lulu's transcendent talent, spotting it early on in their cramped Chicago apartment, then watching her granddaughter ascend to dizzying heights in packed international concert halls. But as the curse predicted, Lulu's mother, a sultry and elusive jazz singer, disappeared into her bitterness in the face of Lulu's superior talent—before disappearing from her family's life altogether. Now, in the early days of her own daughter's life, Lulu now finds herself weighing her overwhelming love for her child against the burden of her family's past.

In incandescent prose, debut novelist Adrienne Celt skillfully intertwines the sensuous but precise physicality of both motherhood and music. She infuses The Daughters with the spirit of the rusalka, a bewitching figure of Polish mythology that inspired Dvořák's classic opera. The result is a tapestry of secrets, affairs, and unimaginable sacrifices, revealing a family legacy laced with brilliance, tragedy, and most mysterious and seductive of all—the resonant ancestral lore that binds each mother to the one that came before.

Genres: Fiction, Fantasy, Magical Realism, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Novels, Book Club

272 pages, Paperback

First published August 3, 2015

About the author

Adrienne Celt is a writer, cartoonist, and avid reader living in Tucson, AZ. Her debut novel THE DAUGHTERS won the 2015 PEN Southwest Book Award and was shortlisted for the 2016 Crawford Award. Her second novel, INVITATION TO A BONFIRE was a June 2018 Indie Next Pick, an Amazon Top 10 Book of the Month, and named a Best Book of the Year by the Financial Times. Her new novel, END OF THE WORLD HOUSE, will be published in spring 2022.

Winner of a 2016 O. Henry Prize, her short fiction and essays have appeared in Esquire, The Kenyon Review, Epoch, Zyzzyva, Ecotone, The Tin House Open Bar, Prairie Schooner, Electric Literature, The Lit Hub, and many other places. Also a cartoonist, her comics have been published by The Rumpus, The Toast, Bat City Review, Broad! Magazine, The Southeast Review, and other places, as well as appearing on her weekly webcomic: loveamongthelampreys.com. A collection of her comics, APOCALYPSE HOW? AN EXISTENTIAL BESTIARY was published in 2016.

Reviews

[Althea Ann · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oddly, my second book about an opera singer that I've read this year, following Alexander Chee's historical melodrama: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

This one, however, is a contemporary tale. Lulu, the singer, has recently given birth to a daughter, and is still physically recovering from the ordeal. She's also having quite a lot of stress regarding her secret: the girl is not her husband's child. Does he suspect? Should she tell him? On top of that, there are the questions likely shared by all new mothers: how does the existence of this new person change me? Who IS this neonate individual? And, one thought leading to another: Who am I? And who was my mother, and hers in turn?

Lulu's childhood was one of a rift: Her mother, a jazz singer, was a wild and largely absent figure. Her grandmother filled her head with fanciful tales of family history, mixing fact with Polish folklore liberally, creating a mythic version of an escape from a war-torn country, the tragedy of lost family members, and a devil's bargain that resulted in a curse that would carry down the generations, mother to daughter.

I have to admit that it was the folklore and the curse that brought me to the table. I stayed to savor the beautiful language - the writing here is lovely. However, the main focus of the book - as the title clearly implies - is motherhood and relationships between mothers and daughters, and I have to admit that the topic of becoming a mother is not one that enormously interests me. The drama between the main character and her husband also didn't grab me at all. Others will naturally feel differently, I'm sure.

[Scout · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the (many) things I found stunning about this novel is the way it doesn't just walk a line between realism and magical realism, but plays with it in a way I found to be totally fresh and actually pretty remarkable, so the reader is constantly asked to reconsider what is true and knowable, and what is wondrous and mysterious about our lives and the way we tell them into being through story. Exquisitely written sentences just ice it. Really worth getting lost in.

[Joanne · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unfortunately the synopsis was more interesting than the plot of this book. While it wasn't particularly bad, and the writing was pretty, nothing really happened. To be honest, after a couple of disappointing misses, maybe I should just consider magical realism as being "not for me"

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oof. I'm not even sure I can adequately sum up what reading this book meant to me. The number of times, as I read, that I felt the gooseflesh break out over my arms due to a particular turn of phrase—ah, I lose count.

At heart, Adrienne Celt has written a story of inheritance and legend, of women being led by the past into the future, of surviving and succumbing to the things they love and fear most. Essentially—read this. It's lovely. It'll be out in August, and you should get a copy.

[Book Riot Community]

In Celt’s dazzling debut, new mother Lulu is a world-famous opera singer who can no longer sing. According to Lulu’s family lore, when a woman has a daughter, she loses something vital…and Lulu has just had a daughter. Bouncing back and forth between past and present, The Daughters is a gorgeous, riveting story about family, mythology, and curses.



Tune in to our weekly podcast dedicated to all things new books, All The Books: http://bookriot.com/category/all-the-...

[Jenn Fields · Rating 4 out of 5]

The question at the heart of "The Daughters" is not whether the mothers and daughters of this family are cursed, but whether it's possible to escape a finely-woven web of family mythology.
Full review of Celt's lyric, dark novel at DenverPost.com.

[Lizzy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A friend once asked me how I define great writing. Great writing can be characterized by many things, but one particular thing that makes writing stand out for me is when beautiful words are put to complicated and nuanced thoughts, feelings, or experiences that I've had, but have been unable to articulate to others (or even myself). There is both a sense of relief and companionship in sharing the articulation of the complicated human experience.
"The Daughters" is beautifully written and I would call Celt's writing great for many reasons -- the novel is enthralling and complex, the subjects well-researched, and her exploration of relationships multi-dimensional and enlightening. But my favorite thing about reading "The Daughters" was the sheer number of times I sat back to let a passage or sentence soak in, and thought to myself "Yes! That is exactly it. No other words could have captured that feeling/thought/experience more perfectly."
Read this novel; it is truly great.

[Rhonda Lomazow · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully written multi layered novel.A story full of Polish folklore opera &the complexities of Mother daughter relationships.Highly recommend this gorgeous novel.

[Peggy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't really understand the rave reviews. Reading this for Book Club felt like homework. I was relieved when it was finally, finally over. I feel vaguely betrayed that I put time into this story and came away with nothing. I found myself thinking, "I'm investing all this time in this book--where's the payoff to the story?" There was no insights gained, no new perspectives. I was trudging through the words like snowdrifts: The first few steps are pretty and then it just becomes hard work. And annoying.

At first I thought that I didn't like it because I don't have a daughter so perhaps it was because I couldn't relate.

Now I think that I didn't like it because it took 269 pages to say nothing. However "pretty" the prose is, the plot could have been a haiku:
four generations
sing and cheat on their husbands
folk lore mixed with truth

There was zero plot development, and really zero character development. What made Sara leave? Where did she go? Why didn't Ada ever sing? What made Lulu cheat? Was Lulu really Ada's daughter, not her grand daughter?

This story was "Like Water For Chocolate"'s fairy tale qualities meets "Bel Canto"'s opera singer.
The writing might have been "pretty" but the story was boooring. And not worth the rave reviews.

[Mia · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book managed to keep my attention throughout, but by the end I felt as though something was still missing from the plot.

[La Tonya Jordan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a slow read and was not as interesting as the synopsis would have you to believe. Lulu is a professional opera singer and there is a curse in her family. After the birth of a woman's first girl child, she will lose a gift. In this case Lulu lost her ability to sing after giving birth to her daughter Kara. This is how the book started. The middle of the book spoke to her childhood, the tense relationship she had with her mother, and her grandmother BaBa Ada who she adorned and the wonderful stories her grandmother told her as a child. The stories were so wonderfully told you did not know where the truth begun and the fantasy started. This book skipped between reality and fantasy which made it confusing and boring at times.

Quote:
Things happen just because we do them, she said. Sometimes.

After all, there was nothing between them - the tension of incomprehension and the tension of awareness.

[Katelyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this at a good time, pregnant with my first daughter. Therefore, the parts about Luscia and her experiences with new daughter Kara, as well as the importance of new daughters with each generation, really resonated with me. The writing was often lyrical. Overall I wanted to keep coming back to it, because of the above, but I also skimmed heavily at parts, so I don't think I'd recommend it to many people.

[Chaitra · Rating 3 out of 5]

This will be a short review, since I already can't remember much about The Daughters. Yes, it's lyrical, and it's about an opera diva, and it's about mothers and daughters and an ancient curse. It makes for a good premise, but the problem is that it goes nowhere in particular. There are a lot of things unsaid, which are fine in some books, but I didn't think it helped this one. I'll read a future book if Adrienne Celt's name is on it though, because she does write beautiful sentences.

[Sara Sams · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was as easy for me to become absorbed in The Daughters as it was for Lulu to become absorbed in her own family lore. The language is lush and insightful. Come music lovers, especially-- those of us who tend to dwell in imaginations made rounder by sound.

[Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Put together a write-up of this for the Southeast Review. It's out now!

[hopeforbooks · Rating 2 out of 5]

Książka momentami niezrozumiała i chaotyczna. Zawiera ona elementy realizmu magicznego, muszę więc stwierdzić, że nie jest on dla mnie. Z tego też powodu czytanie jej nie sprawiło mi przyjemności. Nie będę ukrywać - ma ona swój klimat i magię, styl pisania jest ładny, wręcz trochę artystyczny. Jednak tę magię trzeba poczuć. Do mnie ta historia po prostu nie trafiła. Choć jestem w stanie zrozumieć osoby, którym ta powieść się podoba. Ja osobiście nie potrafiłam zżyć się z bohaterami, nie do końca rozumiałam, co nimi kieruje. Rozczarowała mnie ta książka, w moim przypadku bardzo nietrafiona pozycja, ale może wam bardziej przypadnie do gustu

[Snem · Rating 2 out of 5]

The premise was really cool. I enjoyed the character of Ada and found her a fun mixture of loving and spunky. There were some beautifully descriptive passages in here. The Polish folklore and magic were intriguing.

My main problem with this book is in execution. It simply didn’t rise to the level of the promising premise. I found it rather boring and it just didn’t hold my interest.

While it was well-written and I’d be interested in reading more from this author, this particular book is not memorable.

[Pamela Bruce Bruchwalski · Rating 3 out of 5]

The three stars are generous. Although the writing is beautiful, it’s so beautiful that it obscures the nearly non-existent plot. I admit that I started to skim-read about a third of the way through. Because I read this for a book club, I might go back and more thoroughly read some parts right before we meet. Maybe. If you read a couple of chapters of lovely writing, you’ve pretty much read the best part of the book.

[Dlynn1116 · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. I think the title is excellent. I really liked the characters but I wanted something more from them, I felt like Ada and Sara’s stories were incomplete.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed how Celt wrote about music. I felt like there wasn't quite enough pay off on the Gretta/family history aspect, but overall liked it a lot.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to Edelweiss for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I thought that this book had prose like a swarm of bees: humming and buzzing and uncannily alive. I really loved the experience of reading the words that make up this book, which is pretty rare for me; I value prose strength as probably the least-valuable criterion for evaluation (because there are authors who are truly incredible word-artists but their books are boring).

I also really liked all the Greta stuff, which reminded me of fairy tales (obviously and intentionally). Quite a lovely aesthetic, and it felt really comfortably integrated into the body of the story.

That being said, the rest of the book was less enthralling. I hate when people say that they don't "connect to the characters" because I think maybe sometimes the point of a book is that you cannot connect with a character, but even if I cannot connect to a character I have the expectation that I will be engrossed by her/him, and I did not feel very engrossed by our present-day characters. Flashbacks, certainly, but not by the forward motion of the story, and that's a pity.

I wish that there had been something for me to sink into, but I didn't feel that pull or that gravity.

3.5/5

[Carly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty story and the author has a vivid imagination, but the plot didn't really come together. Also left me wondering if the author really knew much about Poland. She talks a lot about the woods and villages, and yet consistently refers to Ada coming from Poznan - hardly a village. - so I sometimes struggled to orientate myself in the story.

The names she used also threw me off. Maybe it's nitpicky, but a Polish great-grandmother called Greta? Malgorzata (or the diminutive Gosia) would be the Polish equivalent...unless they were Jews with Germanic descent, perhaps, which the story sometimes implies (perhaps in the rather obvious naming of the great-grandfather, Saul), yet the author never really gives enough to that theory (something that would make the fall out even more catastrophic, in my opinion).

There are a lot of threads left hanging, perhaps due to this being the author's first story. And I must say that while Lulu grew on me as the story progressed, I never really did end up liking her or empathizing with her.

That said, there were passages that were truly lovely. I enjoyed some of the more vivid passages and her rich use of language.

[Barb · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm going to try to do this without spoilers!

The Daughters deals in the many layers of connection between mothers and daughters and lovers. In her first novel, Celt manages to write with rich prose that stops just short of showing off. At times her use of description is lush, but then she drops in a gorgeous fragment to bring me back to the now.
The book's setting also telescopes back and forth in time without ever dropping the central threads of the protagonist's story. Lulu is lost in a postpartum fog of family legend, Polish folklore, and modern morals.
I savored this, and read it more slowly than I needed because I loved these characters and the atmosphere around them!

[Alicia · Rating 3 out of 5]

http://wordnerdy.blogspot.com/2015/09...

This was a very pretty little book about a line of mothers and daughters, their musical talents, their storytelling, and so on. It centers on Lulu, a successful opera singer who has just given birth, as she meditates on motherhood and on the stories she was told of her great-grandmother in Poland. The writing here is really strong, but I did wish for a little bit /more/, particularly about Lulu's mother Sara. And about the Jewish people on the other side of the great-grandmother's town--there are some interesting hints dropped here that aren't really followed up on. B/B+.

[Robin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. It may not be for everyone but I'm s sucker for lyrical prose and imaginative story telling with a little mystery and magic thrown in. It might be considered a modern fairy tale or a cautionary tale but for me it was a glorious escape into the imagination of a gifted writer. I may just sit down and read it through again, just for the pleasure of it. NPR labeled it "seriously good writing" on their top books of 2015 and I agree.

[Catherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

What I liked: the complex women, the perennial ethical discomfort of Polish families with unclear history, the opera, the mythology.

What I didn't: the heavy craft of it. It was a little like opera that way, I knew where we were going based on the tone, and it was a bit, uh, extra. That and it tried to be about too many things: motherhood and career and history and adultery and religion. I couldn't quite keep up, even though I wanted to read all of those individual stories.

[Carrie Waibel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed the fine line between storytelling and the truth, especially as it relates to Polish history.

[Ella · Rating 4 out of 5]

Starts off really strong and doesn't quite fulfill that promise, but it's still a wonderful story that captures some of the magic of this family. It's great.

[Jackie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I did not know I was going to love this little book so much. Somehow it just riveted me with its mix of emotional reality and fairy tale.

[Linda · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF