The Daughters
Lulu can't sing. Since the traumatic birth of her daughter, the internationally renowned soprano hasn't dared utter a note. She's afraid that her body is too fragile and that she may have lost her talent to a long-dreaded curse afflicting all of the mothers in her family.
When Lulu was a child, her strong-willed grandmother Ada filled her head with fables of the family's enchanted history in the Polish countryside. A fantastical lore took hold--an incantatory mix of young love, desperate hope, and one sinister bargain that altered the family's history forever. Since that fateful pact, Ada tells Lulu, each mother in their family has been given a daughter, but each daughter has exacted an essential cost from her mother.
Ada was the first to recognize young Lulu's transcendent talent, spotting it early on in their cramped Chicago apartment, then watching her granddaughter ascend to dizzying heights in packed international concert halls. But as the curse predicted, Lulu's mother, a sultry and elusive jazz singer, disappeared into her bitterness in the face of Lulu's superior talent--before disappearing from her family's life altogether. Now, in the early days of her own daughter's life, Lulu now finds herself weighing her overwhelming love for her child against the burden of her family's past.
In incandescent prose, debut novelist Adrienne Celt skillfully intertwines the sensuous but precise physicality of both motherhood and music. She infuses The Daughters with the spirit of the rusalka, a bewitching figure of Polish mythology that inspired Dvorák's classic opera. The result is a tapestry of secrets, affairs, and unimaginable sacrifices, revealing a family legacy laced with brilliance, tragedy, and most mysterious and seductive of all--the resonant ancestral lore that binds each mother to the one that came before.
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A story libretto that commands attention from the opening scene. Celt has crafted a modern fairy tale that had me up from my chair in standing ovation.--Sarah McCoy, New York Times and international best-selling author of The Mapmaker's Children
A lush song of a book that understands the intertwined beauty and fear of motherhood and daughterhood.--Caitlin Horrocks, author of This is Not Your City
Celt's family saga--steeped in folklore and vibrating with music--is as much about the power of storytelling as the fraught relationships between mothers and daughters.... A haunting novel with real emotional depth, Celt's psychologically nuanced debut continues to resonate long after the last page has been turned.
After the birth of her daughter, opera sensation Lulu fears a family curse has made her lose her voice, in Celt's lyrical debut novel about the perplexing riddle of inheritance.--Sarah Meyer
Celt's debut is a carefully crafted and mesmerizing look at one family's history.... A beautifully written exploration of the myths and the realities that bind families together that will leave readers eagerly awaiting Celt's next novel.
In this novel, voice and music and history and storytelling and mythmaking and motherhood and protection of the self are in many ways the same: Living animals, changeable and complex, adaptive and perilous and endlessly powerful.... Here is one you should not miss, a gratifying feast in lush, lyrical, and full-throated form.--Carmen Maria Machado
Brimming with sad, delicious folklore and echoing with the voices of five generations of mothers and daughters in a family shaped by music as much as by tragedy, Celt's debut is enchanting.--Sarah Cornwell, author of What I Had Before I Had You
