Daughter

Title: Daughter
Author: Jane Shemilt
Type: Paperback
Read: 9th June - 12th June
Rating: 4/5
Published: 28th August 2014 by Penguin

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.

The basis of this book attracted me to it, a child goes missing.. and my first thoughts are why and do they find her? We then see the stroy told via Jenny (mum), who is a very successful and busy doctor. Her husband Ted too works none stop at the hospital. Both are always preoccupied and rushing about, never having time to listen. They also have three children, twins Ed and Theo and their only daughter Naomi.

The story is told via Jenny, from the night Naomi goes missing then switching back and forth to the days before and the months/year afterwards. We catch glimpses of what Jenny see's - what she thinks she understood and really, what she actually misses through her busy schedule. How its pretty impsosible to balance a hetic career and expect your children to grow up without you there. That as they grow older, things change and secrets happen.

Like i said the basis of the story i liked. I think it was simple enough to read and you get drawn into the world of Jenny, you want to know where Naomi has gone and whats happened. I also got annoyed with Jenny. Her guilt was sometimes too much, almost at times too late. She tried to justify everything when as a reader you could see through it. Children aren't innocent, especially when teenagers. They have many secrets and thats just what Naomi had. She played so much on the fact her parents weren't around to watch her, she even played them against each other. I understand loosing a child would be hard, especially when you think there's no reason of it.

I felt mainly sorry for the twins Ed & Theo, as it almost at times seemed like they were forgotten. That all the focus was on Naomi and what they thought/felt wasn't important. And as twins they were the total oppoisite of each other it was all the more sadder.

The reason i am giving this story four stars and not five, is the ending. We get through approximately 95% of the book before we even get any idea of what happened to Naomi and then the ending twisted. Like there was something solid and then it just changed and your left wondering what kind of mother would even accept that. I wouldn't. I don't understand why it ended so. I think there could have been a little more added to conclude the book properly. But overall a great read. I'm looking forward to what else this author has to offer next.

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