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Title: Daughter's Keeper by Ayelet Waldman ISBN: 1-4022-0096-X Publisher: Sourcebooks Trade Pub. Date: October, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.57 (14 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Searing, shocking and very, very good
Comment: As a fan of Waldman's light-hearted mysteries, I wasn't prepared for Daughter's Keeper. As other reviewers noted, a young Olivia gets caught up in the drug trade of her hapless boyfriend. Both were naive: he just wanted to make easy money and she never realized what was going on.
And both got caught in a net that was obviously set to trap some small fish.
This book is not easy to read. It's scary to realize how easily an innocent person can get caught up in the legal system, and how the byzantine system with its "mandatory minimums" and arbitrary definitions end up harming in the innocent. The federal government spends huge sums to try and imprison these people, while we have no money for drug rehab programs and health care.
At one point, Olivia makes an impassioned speech to a judge about the stupidity of the system. Those who are innocent have nothing to offer as a plea bargain because they don't know anything! And she's right.
Waldman does a superb job with characters -- not black and white, just real people with flaws. However, Olivia's relationship with her mother seems to pale when compared to her confrontation with the law.
Between books like Daughter's Keeper and movies like Traffic, one would hope some politicians would wake up and realize we're not winning the war on drugs. The price of drugs has gone down and the quality is better, says Olivia, a sign that the market has become more efficient and has attracted more customers. We're just throwing money that might be better used elsewhere.
Rating: 5
Summary: Domestic Naturalism Collides Beautifully With Legal Realism
Comment: This is one of the rare occasions when all of the advance word from authors blurbing a book, the jacket copy and the initial reviewing press aren't just hype. Waldman is telling a scary but utterly believable story with well-delineated characters who are both sympathetic and frighteningly true, meaning 100% human and convincing.
In telling Olivia's story, Waldman has not made her heroine or her heroine's mother Elaine innocent--both are complicitous in small, wonderfully familiar ways (who with a family doesn't get sucked into uncertain, not-quite-kosher areas of culpability?). And both get our moral support through Waldman's gift of weaving past and present into a seamless drama. I've read the author's mysteries and all are well-crafted narratives, flesh-and-blood populated, with compelling back stories that come to light in the end. But here Waldman has confirmed what readers of the Juliet Applebaum/Mommy Track novels have suspected all along: she's a literary contender, and means business. She's one of the rare writers who dare to work with issues that are of life-and-death interest to us, and not give in to the solipsistic tendencies of authors plying their trade in semiotic self-obfuscations or artsy word play. She's telling us the story of her society as she sees it, and given her legal background (which informs the exposition with matter-of-fact dryness to breathtaking effect at times), she'll be telling us the story and stories related to it again and again.
Rating: 4
Summary: A personal account of a brutal, and harsh justice system
Comment: I was quite surprised at some of the negative reviews of Daughter's Keeper. I thought it was quite an intelligent, well-written and thought provoking story. Waldman writes with a genuine passion and intensity that resonates throughout the work, and her attitudes towards the criminal justice system are weaved quite effortlessly into the narrative. Even though the story does have a tendency to drift into clichéd melodrama, Waldman still does a terrific job at presenting the human costs of the federal incarceration laws. Daughter's Keeper works on a number of different levels: As a portrait of a family in crisis; a mother-daughter love story; an indictment of the criminal justice system, and as an intuitive study of motherhood and what it means to be a mother.
When the independently minded and headstrong Olivia is arrested under suspicion of dealing in methamphetamines with her Mexican boyfriend Jorge, she is catapulted into a nightmarish scenario - where both Olivia and her self-sufficient mother Elaine, are forced to confront head-on the government's war on drugs. As Olivia faces criminal prosecution, Elaine must come to terms with her own hidden regrets and grasp the opportunity for a second chance with her daughter.
Waldman manages to weave astute characterization, with a perceptive use of drama to produce a story that shows not only the inequities of a judicial system that sees only in black and white, but also those strong bonds between mother and daughter. She has a nice easy, relaxed style that pleasantly balances natural conversation, and the interior description of the characters' inner lives, with a solid dramatic tension. Daughter's Keeper will teach you a lot about mandatory minimum sentences and also make you question whether the federal government is really winning the war on drugs. This is a good "message" book.
Michael
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Title: Death Gets a Time-Out by Ayelet Waldman ISBN: 0425190145 Publisher: Prime Crime Pub. Date: 01 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: A Playdate With Death by Ayelet Waldman ISBN: 0425191044 Publisher: Prime Crime Pub. Date: 01 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: Nursery Crimes by Ayelet Waldman ISBN: 042518000X Publisher: Prime Crime Pub. Date: 10 July, 2001 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: The Big Nap by Ayelet Waldman ISBN: 0425184528 Publisher: Prime Crime Pub. Date: 02 July, 2002 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: L'Affaire by Diane Johnson ISBN: 052594740X Publisher: E P Dutton Pub. Date: 25 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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