Letter to My Daughter

September 28, 2009
This slight and gauzy novel fails to find anything new in the familiar terrain of mothers and their volatile teenage daughters. After Elizabeth storms out of the house in the wake of an argument on her 15th birthday, her mother, Laura, writes her a letter, endeavoring to tell Liz “the truth about how a girl grows up” by recounting her own adolescence. Laura's high school romance with Tim, a poor Cajun boy, is an act of rebellion against her intolerant parents that resulted in her transfer to a Catholic girls' school. Though Laura's relationship is a source of cruel mirth for her classmates, her correspondence with Tim continues, even as Tim ships off to Vietnam and Laura questions her devotion to her long-distance lover. Bishop's debut may be an interesting exercise in writing from the opposite gender's point of view, but most of the novel's insights into the mother-daughter relationship, and into female adolescence, have been explored innumerable times—and in more compelling ways—in countless young adult novels.

November 1, 2009
When a girl runs away from home on the eve of her 15th birthday, her mother sits down to write her a letter.

Laura hopes to bridge the gap between herself and daughter Elizabeth by describing her own coming-of-age experiences in a small, rigidly stratified Louisiana town. It's a clever conceit, but one that could support at most a short story. Debut author Bishop has hobbled himself not only with the formal constraints of an epistolary novel, but also with an unbelievable framing device: What parent is going to while away the hours penning her memoirs when her child is missing? In the form of a letter well over a hundred pages, written in a single night? Those willing to suspend disbelief are further tested with constructions like this:"Your grandparents were Baptists, as you know." Surely there are less awkward ways to impart information to readers.

A gimmicky debut.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

February 1, 2010
Middle-aged Louisiana mother Laura Jenkins slaps her teenage daughter, Liz, on the eve of her 15th birthday during an argument. Liz runs away in the family car while her parents stew anxiously at home, waiting for news of her whereabouts. Laura uses this time to write a long letter to Liz about her own troubled adolescence growing up rebellious in a strict, bigoted Southern home. At the heart of Laura's own 1969 coming-of-age story is her forbidden love for high school senior Tim Prejean. Laura's parents ship her off to a Catholic boarding school after catching the young lovers, and Tim enlists in the army and heads to Vietnam, keeping the romance alive through clandestine letters. Bishop wonderfully captures the impossibility of being 15, romantic, and eager to embrace adventure. VERDICT Readers who don't scratch too deeply, accepting the somewhat improbable premise that a mother would write a book-length letter while frantically awaiting word of her missing daughter, will find much to enjoy as Bishop brings alive an independent, fearless young Laura. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 10/1/09.]Beth E. Anderson, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2010
Hankie alert! Bishops debut is guaranteed to keep the tears flowing. Thankfully, this weeper is mercifully short; if it were any longer, it would not be able to sustain its calculated emotional wallop. After a teenage girl runs away in the middle of the night, her mother sits down to write her a letter, pouring her heart and soul into her own life storythe story she never before revealed to her troubled daughter. Of course, Lizs life was no bed of roses either, and she desperately needs her daughter to understand this. As she fills page after page with a litany of the adolescent woes that irrevocably shaped the parent she has become, Liz attempts to make a belated connection with her daughter, her own parents, and perhaps even with herself. The most troubling aspect of the novel is the fact that it was written by a man and never effectively communicates the visceral nature of the mother-daughter bond; still, its destined to be a popular choice for the Nicholas Sparks crowd.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)