Daisy Darker by Alice Feeney
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
“We spend our youth building sandcastles of ambition, then watch as life blows sands of doubt over our carefully crafted turrets of wishes and dreams.”
Daisy Darker is about a very dysfunctional family and the secrets they have kept hidden. It takes place in a seaside house that becomes an island at high tide. This is a locked room mystery in the vein of And Then There Were None. It is told from the point of view of Daisy who is the youngest child of the main family. The story has flashbacks to when the girls were young. There is a storm outside with rain and wind lashing at the house which helps create an atmosphere. It follows the night of the matriarchs 80th birthday where she is found dead then one by one things devolve. Who is a suspect and will it be solved before the tide goes out?
This was the first novel I have read by Alice Feeney and I started out liking how each character was introduced. It seemed like they were walking onto a stage as they were brought in one by one. I did like when the author talked about books and how important they were to several characters. I do love books and reading. Writing was also a key component and I liked how it was interwoven through the family and plot. I had high hopes as I love locked-room mysteries and stories that take place in one location like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and several books by Agatha Christie. This particular story was fine albeit a little contrived. Alice Feeney had some home runs with the writing but then also some strikeouts. Not sure why I resorted to baseball metaphors just now but there were several quotes and ways that Alice phrased things that I did truly love like “Some people drink to drown their sorrows; others drink so they can swim in them.” There were some great life lessons and ways of thinking of things. However, there were times where I think the author went overboard. There were too many platitudes and cliches though and some were forced in which made it sound pretentious for its own sake. I also found only 1 semi-likeable character in the entire book. The family was despicable and had very few redeeming qualities. For most of the book, I was wanting to find out what happened but when I did, I was fully disappointed. There is a twist but it does not pay out. It left a bad taste in my mouth. I had to reflect on the whole story to think about what I missed and things just didn’t add up. I know that it is fiction but this to was just too out there. I felt blindsided and not in a good way. I don’t want to ruin anything but I will say that I don’t like the type of story that it turned out to be. “Doesn’t everyone wonder who they might have been if they weren’t who they were?”
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