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The Stepdaughter
Paperback
Mystery & ThrillerGeneral FictionLiterary Fiction
Publisher Price: $18.00
ISBN13: 9781961341128
Publisher: McNally Editions
Published: Aug 13 2024
Pages: 120
Weight: 0.35
Height: 0.50 Width: 4.90 Depth: 8.40
Language: English
The Stepdaughter is the perfect book for people who find Joan Didion too even-keeled, Renata Adler too fair-minded . . . In its own way, it's a perfect novel . . . Blackwood's best book . . . It deserves to be a cheeky summer hit. --Gideon Leek, Los Angeles Review of Books
A wicked stepmother finds her ideal prey in Carlone Blackwood's quite brilliant (The Times) debut.
A lavish Upper West Side apartment is the site of a familial cold war about to enter a phase of dangerous escalation.
J is a lonely woman without even the luxury of being alone. Her husband has fled to Paris with his latest flame, but he's left J not only with their own four-year-old daughter, Sally Ann, but with the sulky cake-mix addicted, thirteen-year-old Renata, a leftover from his previous marriage. The presence of a pert au pair, Monique, serves only to make J feel more isolated and self-conscious. What she'd like is someone to blame.
Writing letters in her head to imaginary friends, J delights in dwelling on the hapless Renata, who invites a kind of cruelty. This is an invitation J fully intends to take up--and like so many stepmothers before her, she will find that wickedness, once indulged, is a difficult habit to kick. A mordant black splinter of a book, Caroline Blackwood's first novel stands as proof positive of her eternal mastery--and mockery--of the darkest depths of human feeling.
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