Finally! Someone "gets" A.M. Homes and doesn't deem her stone-cold with a stone-cold heart after reading The Mistress's Daughter. Helen Rembelow's review for The Times is punchy and pithy and seems, finally, to truly understand and appreciate how A.M. Homes tells her story and how she reacts to the events of meeting her birth mother and father:
"THIS BOOK IS THE MOST amazing joke. I know the subject matter – adoption, abandonment, death – isn’t the usual stuff of rib-ticklers. I mean a joke of a more profound kind.
A. M. Homes knew from a young age that she was adopted. Like many children, adopted or not, she fantasised about her glamorous “other” parents. Her birth mother, she is sure, is the “Queen of all Queens”, a socialite or movie star. When she learns that her mother was young, single and beautiful when she was handed over, she imagines Audrey Hepburn.
Then, when Homes is 31, the punchline comes. Her mother gets in touch, and is slightly more real than Homes, succesful novelist and childhood fantasist, has bargained for. Her Queen of all Queens is an unemployed, alcoholic conwoman, a wreck of needy self-pity, emboldened to come forward by years of watching Oprah Winfrey on daytime television."
Yet, what seems to irk every reviewer is the last bit of the book - the research and the family tree bit:
"All this mirroring is worthy of the most ancient reunion stories, fairytales and Shakespearean plots, and makes a plot that would seem fantastical in a novel. But while I recommend wholeheartedly the utterly gripping first two thirds of the book, I wish that she had left it at that."
I kind of dug it. But then I think she's terribly funny & delightful, and few agree with me on that point.
