Novel set in Overijssel 1961
A novel of sisters set in LONDON and USA (California)
9th June 2025
Daughters by Kirsty Capes, a novel of sisters set in London and USA (California).
#Audiobook
Mattie is 9 years older than her sister, Nora and they are the daughters of Ingrid Olssen, the renowned Norwegian artist, capricious Wunderkind and chaotic Mother. She has passed away and now there is a reckoning between the sisters for all the neglect and upheaval they suffered as youngsters, Aunt Karo steps in and fans the flames of discord.
During her lifetime Olssen stressed that what she created was “art for art’s sake” and her pieces were never to be sold. But Karo has initiated an exhibition in California and one sister is compliant with lending her inherited artworks, the other not.
We learn a great deal about their dysfunctional childhood in London, how they were abandoned for periods, their mother unavailable both emotionally and physically. Olsson was essentially a self-referring narcissist who catered to her own needs. When Olssen and the father of the two girls separated, there was a custody battle, neither parent wanting the responsibility of their off-spring.
Nora went on to suffer severe mental health issues, following on from a shooting in their home (just one of the catalysts, I would imagine) and Mattie in adolescence became a mother to Beanie. She is now in a relationship with her mother’s biographer, which underlines the lack of boundaries that were – and still are – rife within the family dynamic.
As the date of the exhibition in California approaches, Mattie, Nora and Beanie embark on a road trip, landing in Phoenix, with the express purpose of fulfilling their mother’s wishes of dropping her ashes in a canyon. Then, their intention is to move on to the exhibition venue, via Los Angeles, the city described as “…dirty and unremarkable, architecture on top of architecture on top of advertisement with no discernible pattern or reason .. towards Sunset Strip…”.
From there it is a hop and a skip to San Franciso: “…on the descent into San Francisco, via Halfmoon Bay on Highway 1 morphing into the freeway, the climate changed again. The air moist, the sky overcast and the roads lined with thickets of green trees and grass. There was nothing to see here except endless, perfect landscape, the sea, the sky, the mountains behind. It was so picturesque that it exhausted my eyes. The city itself seemed to creep up on us…” They have arrived in the town where Olsson’s retrospective will be held and they intend to attend.
This is a story of the three women recalibrating their relationships, chewing through the years of abuse and neglect and having a bit of fun on the road. It is a beautifully told story, the author has wonderful writing skills and a sense of the absurd, but it really is overly long and detailed as it revisits various events and underlines the tough nature of their upbringing and the vagaries of Olsson’s personality. It then spins out the ending, which, although poignant in many ways, needed tightening.
Art, essentially, was the artist’s raison d’être and the children an inconvenience and this novel charts the fall-out on the subsequent generations.
I really enjoyed this novel as an audiobook, the narrator did a decent job grappling with various accents, which made it an entertaining listen.
Tina for the TripFiction Team
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