The Captain's Daughter

June 5, 2017
Moore (The Admissions) continues to show off her tight storytelling skills with her latest, a tale about Eliza Barnes, a working-class girl who married into money and finds herself back in her Maine hometown to care for her dying father, Charlie. Having lost Eliza’s mother, Joanie, to cancer when Eliza was little, Charlie insists that he doesn’t want to undergo debilitating treatment for a brain tumor that will return to kill him anyway. Eliza alternates extended stays in Little Harbor with quick visits back to Barton, Mass., where her architect husband, Rob, is struggling with a difficult first-time client and insecurities pertaining to his family’s reliance on his mother’s money. Eliza proves a loving influence on her own children as well as on 17-year-old Mary Brown, the pregnant daughter of an old classmate whose older boyfriend Josh seems like trouble. Both Eliza and Rob face romantic temptation during their time apart, which is the least interesting part of a story that otherwise deftly mines issues of loyalty, class, and what it means to be a parent. Many readers will appreciate Moore’s moving novel, though parents might find it especially speaks to them.