The Other Daughter
by Lisa Gardner
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Book Summary Information
Author: Lisa GardnerEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-07-06
ISBN: 0553576798
Number of pages: 413
Publisher: Bantam
Book Reviews of The Other Daughter
Book Review: Not a Great Book
Summary: 1 Stars
There are some books that seem good the moment you pick them up. When I first stumbled upon "The Other Daughter" the premise seemed good to me. A family with a dark secret, the mystery of a daughter of a killer. It all seemed perplexing. When I began it didn't take long for me to see that I was in for a long ride. Books don't really take me that long to finish, but this one felt like a long time.
Melanie was adopted when she was nine years old by Patricia and Harper Stokes. After the Stokes family has already had to deal with the murder of their other daughter, Meagan, they welcome Melanie into their home with open arms. Melanie, unfortunately, has no memory of her life before the adoption. But on a night twenty years later, a reporter comes up to her professing that he knows the whereabouts of her past. At the same time someone sends the Stokes family a letter saying "You Get What You Deserve." Even more hair-raising, someone is trying to revive Melanie's memories. Suddenly she has memories of Meagan Stokes. An FBI Agent by the name of David Riggs is helping her out, and what he uncovers shocks Melanie. The family you love so much may be the people you should trust the least.
It seemed like a good story, but I was left with a few unanswered questions. For one, the story never actually explains just why or how Melanie forgot the first nine years of her life. Of all aspects of the story, this was the one that kept me reading more than any other. But Gardner never explains it and the characters in the story don't even offer speculation.
Even worse, the story itself seems a little implausible. There's just too much stacked up. The family is involved in more than just a twenty year conspiracy. The problem is, they're in over their head. This caused for more plotholes in the story than there needed to be. Rather than putting up with several subplots, it may have been best to just focus on the dilemna surrounding the conspiracy.
The story is obviously plot driven (and sub plot driven). This is apparent through the lack of heart and emotion in these characters. Not very many of these charactes undergo development. Many of them are cliched characters. It's no question about what they will do or why, they're only playing the pivotal role of the stereotype assigned to them. The grieving mother, the rich, sinister and secretive father, the defiant son and the innocent victim unwilling to believe it all and the heroic man coming to save her.
The accompany many of the lackluster characters, Gardner has provided to moments that often seem soap operaish. The dialogue for instance just doesn't flow well with the story. The characters often say and do things that no one would say in those situations. When your life is on the line, and you've just seen a murder, I highly doubt that you'll want to make love to someone you pretty much just met. In another instant our heroine is backhanded by her father and her mother cries for them to stop. The next set of prose deals with how her father couldn't have possibly done that to her. It goes on like this throughout the book. The characters are overdramatic in what they do.
In the end the story didn't really come together either. There were so many subplots, and the family was so dysfunctional that nothing really came together in a logical way. Often bad dialogue and over the top "performances" by these characters made the book unenjoyable. Too much emphasis on the plot rather than the characters also made them uninteresting. There's nothing wrong with putting an emphasis on the plot, but the players in that plot--the characters who have to make it work--shouldn't have to suffer as a result.
Summary of The Other Daughter
Twenty years ago, Melanie Stokes was abandoned in a Boston hospital, then adopted by a wealthy young couple. Gifted with loving parents, a doting brother, and an indulgent uncle, Melanie has always considered herself lucky. Until the first cryptic, threatening note arrives: ?You Get What You Deserve.?Melanie has no memory of her life before the adoption. Now someone wants her to remember it all?even the darkest nightmare the Stokes family ever faced: the murder of their first daughter. As Melanie pursues every lead and chases every shadow in search of her real identity, two seemingly unrelated events from her past will come together in a dangerous explosion of truth.
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