Daughters

Daughters is as devastating as it is hilarious, as tender and moving as it is shocking--this is a book that will stay with you long after you have turned the final pages.

When Mattie and Nora's mother, the brilliant, troubled, and world-renowned British painter Ingrid Olssen, was on her deathbed, there was one promise she asked her daughters to make: Burn it all. Throw it all away. Even her most famous painting, Girls, of her daughters as children. She didn't want it sold, didn't want it celebrated. Art is transient. She wanted it gone. All of it.

Two years later, Mattie hasn't done anything with any of it except for lock it in a storage unit. She's barely seen Nora since Nora skipped their mother's funeral. Besides, she has her hands full raising the bold, creative teenage daughter she had when she was only a teenager herself. It was giving birth to Beanie that let her escape her mother's house--that and the support of Beanie's father, Gus, who she's long since split from but is still (or again) her biggest fan . . . setting aside her mother's biographer, that is, who she's spent the past six months sleeping with.

But when Nora, an artist herself, falls deep into a mental health crisis of her own, Mattie does what any big sister would do. Despite the fractures their mother helped form between them, Nora comes to live with her and Beanie. And when their aunt Karo sets up the very last thing their mother ever would have wanted--an enormous retrospective featuring Girls as its centerpiece--the two of them somehow find themself on the road trip of their lives: up the West Coast of the United States, with Beanie and their mother's ashes in tow.

As they hurtle toward the exhibition, they find that for the first time, maybe they will be able to unpick the scars of the past that have always kept the two of them at a distance.

Perfect for fans of Daisy Jones and the Six, and told partly in the form of the interviews that comprise Ingrid's biography, Daughters is a must-read.