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So in all honesty it’s been a while since I listened to The Mistress’s Daughter by A.M. Homes.  I have discovered (and I suspected this would be true of me) that with two kids in the car it’s probably better for me to have read a book before listening to the audio.  I’m just too distracted.  I can’t pay attention. Plus, I got really impatient.  I wanted to speed things up.  Obviously, I can read faster than I can listen to a book and felt like it was taking way to long to get through the book.   And again, being honest here, I don’t consider myself “well-listened” when it comes to audio books.  Totally new territory for me.  I’ve really only listened to the Harry Potter books, which I ADORED in audio.  But I had read them previously.  Thus enhancing my enjoyment I think.  I had never read The Mistress’s Daughter but had it on my bookshelf and when going out of town and pursuing the library thought it would be perfect to listen to while in the car.

It took me weeks and weeks to listen to this very short memoir.  I did not like the narrator at all and found myself wincing when I turned the audio back on.  Annoyed.  Very annoyed.  That, of course, hampered my enjoyment.  I really wish I had read this book in print instead of having listened to it.  But even if I had read it, I suspect that I would have felt slightly annoyed with the book itself as well.  I never really connected to A.M. Home’s story which is sad because it’s a memoir.  I always hate when I don’t love a memoir because then it feels like I’m discounting the author’s story.  It’s their life experience.  And I don’t want to dismiss anybody’s life experience as being less than what it is.  But it is what it is, and I never connected with her or her story.

In this memoir, author A.M. Homes  recounts how she was given up for adoption before she was born.  Her adoptive parents won’t tell her anything about her birth, her adoption, or her background.  The Mistress’s Daughter is the story of how at the age of thirty, she reconnects with her birth parents and the road she travels in discovering how she is, who her family is and does that knowledge really change who she is?  In her case, yes, the family narrative she discovers has a direct correlation with her sense of self.

All her life, she knew that there was some secrecy behind her birth.  Her adoptive mother simply wouldn’t give her any answers.  It was these answers that she would have to discover for herself.  She becomes obsessed with genealogy work on both her biological and adoptive sides of the family.  And when her birth mother dies, she hopes to figuratively find her mother in the box of personal effects that she left behind.  And in doing so, she hopes to find herself as well.

I really wanted to love this book but found both her story and the narrator annoying enough that I couldn’t embrace it like I had hoped.   I never understood the motives that drove the story.  Sure, she explained the motives and I knew of them, but I just had a difficult time believing in them.  I never felt convinced of the genuineness and truth of the story.  And I HATE to say something like that particularly for a memoir because it is her truth.  As for me, I simply kept shaking my head and saying, “Really?  I just don’t get this.”

This one of those book reviews that I simply wonder if I would be singing a different tune had I not listened to the audio.  Perhaps I would have been more apt to receive the story had I not been annoyed by the narrator every time  I simply hit the play button.  So, moral of the story?  Skip the audio for this one and read the book.  But even then, I was a bit leary.  I’d be curious to hear what others think of it.  As for me, The Mistress’s Daughter just didn’t do it for me.

Links of interest: A.M Homes website.
Genre: Non-Fiction, Memoir
Publisher: Viking Adult. April 5, 2007
Hardcover, 240 pages. ISBN 0670038385
The Mistress’s Daughter is available from your favorite independent bookstore, Powell’s, and Amazon.

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