Title: Exasperating experience
Review: I have never returned a book for a refund. Until now. And that's a shame, because David Long is a master of the English language. Technically, his writing is brilliant - and that's what the two stars are for. The problem with "Daughters" is that we are led down a meandering road full of broken promises. I won't recount the story, as that's been done. Suffice to say, after an intriguing prologue and even more mysterious and fascinating opening chapter, this book devolves into a series of endless, exasperating phone and email monologues. At one stretch, a single email drags on for 30 consecutive pages and offers nothing to advance the story but plenty of frustrate the reader. Any so-called resolution to the mystery is an out-of-left-field theory involving a tiny character who emerges through another tiny character's recollections in the last fifty pages. The middle third of this book could have been dropped. This is a novella at most and a short story at best.
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