A heart-aching comedy about three generations of mother-daughter love.
Nora Fawn’s daughter, Hope, disappeared four years ago. Nora has never known why. Refusing to answer her mother’s calls, emails or texts, Hope maintained contact only with her big sister, Joy. Having once considered her mothering to be the greatest achievement of her life, Nora’s spent these Hope-less years searching, aching, mother-guilting, working for a famous yet talentless artist and avoiding her own emotionally repressed mother, Daphne.
But… last night Hope rang out of the blue to say, ‘I’m coming home, I’m getting married, the wedding is in three weeks and it’s your job to organise it.’ Desperate to prove her worth as a mother and regain her daughter’s love, Nora commits to the task – assisted by her own increasingly dementia’d mother and her two best friends, Soula (an amateur bikini-line waxer) and Thilma (whom they found in a cab in the 1980s).
What follows is an often madcap, often heartbreaking, and always entertaining journey into female connection: mothers, daughters, family and friends. Told through Nora’s diary entries, My Daughter’s Wedding is a fast-paced read that packs some surprising emotional punch.
It is both hilarious and profound as it explores the confounding complexity, wild terrain, mountains, valleys and quicksand found in three generations of mother-daughter love. Nora is a marvellous protagonist: complex, compelling, intelligent and very funny. While I don’t have daughters, I absolutely related to her take on motherhood, and her journey with both her children. This, along with her relationship with her own mother is the guts of the book, but there’s also a cast of incredibly colourful secondary characters that I loved.
Author Gretel Killeen really needs no introduction. She was the host of Big Brother, and now regularly appears on TV and radio as a social and political commentator. But what many people don’t realise is she is also a prolific writer and has written as a journalist for many of Australia’s leading news publications and is a widely published author. She’s written extensively for both children and adults, and her publishing experience shows here. Gretel really knows how to craft a tale. Here she delivers one hellova story, that will have you laughing out loud constantly, in less than 300 pages.
My Daughter’s Wedding is a polished page-turner… the perfect chick-flick in paperback. You’ll laugh a lot, you’ll even get a little teary… and then you’ll tell your girlfriends all about it.
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