Lulu can't sing. Since the traumatic birth of her daughter, the internationally renowned soprano hasn't dared utter a note. She's afraid that her body is too fragile and that she may have lost her talent to a long-dreaded curse afflicting all of the mothers in her family.
When Lulu was a child, her strong-willed grandmother Ada filled her head with fables of the family's enchanted history in the Polish countryside. A fantastical lore took hold--an incantatory mix of young love, desperate hope, and one sinister bargain that altered the family's history forever. Since that fateful pact, Ada tells Lulu, each mother in their family has been given a daughter, but each daughter has exacted an essential cost from her mother.
Ada was the first to recognize young Lulu's transcendent talent, spotting it early on in their cramped Chicago apartment, then watching her granddaughter ascend to dizzying heights in packed international concert halls. But as the curse predicted, Lulu's mother, a sultry and elusive jazz singer, disappeared into her bitterness in the face of Lulu's superior talent--before disappearing from her family's life altogether. Now, in the early days of her own daughter's life, Lulu now finds herself weighing her overwhelming love for her child against the burden of her family's past.
In incandescent prose, debut novelist Adrienne Celt skillfully intertwines the sensuous but precise physicality of both motherhood and music. She infuses The Daughters with the spirit of the rusalka, a bewitching figure of Polish mythology that inspired Dvorak's classic opera. The result is a tapestry of secrets, affairs, and unimaginable sacrifices, revealing a family legacy laced with brilliance, tragedy, and most mysterious and seductive of all--the resonant ancestral lore that binds each mother to the one that came before.
Industry Reviews
"After the birth of her daughter, opera sensation Lulu fears a family curse has made her lose her voice, in Celt's lyrical debut novel about the perplexing riddle of inheritance." -- Sarah Meyer - O Magazine "Celt's family saga-steeped in folklore and vibrating with music-is as much about the power of storytelling as the fraught relationships between mothers and daughters... A haunting novel with real emotional depth, Celt's psychologically nuanced debut continues to resonate long after the last page has been turned." -- Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review "Short story and comics creator Celt interweaves themes of music, motherhood, and myth in her lyrical debut novel... The novel's luminous prose, subtle structure, and rich contrast between present-day Chicago and Old World folklore help craft a resonant meditation on the way our stories at once shape and sabotage our lives." -- Publishers Weekly "In this novel, voice and music and history and storytelling and mythmaking and motherhood and protection of the self are in many ways the same: Living animals, changeable and complex, adaptive and perilous and endlessly powerful... Here is one you should not miss, a gratifying feast in lush, lyrical, and full-throated form." -- Carmen Maria Machado - NPR "Much of The Daughters is written in a dreamy, mystical key, reminiscent of Alice Hoffman... I admire the way that Celt's novel acknowledges the radical shift of motherhood on a lusty, dark note, without agonizing about parenting choices or apologizing for the mother's creative or sexual needs." -- Lydia Kiesling - The Guardian "A lyrical and poetic debut about the strength of storytelling and mother-daughter love." -- Library Journal "Celt's debut is a carefully crafted and mesmerizing look at one family's history... A beautifully written exploration of the myths and the realities that bind families together that will leave readers eagerly awaiting Celt's next novel." -- Booklist "A story libretto that commands attention from the opening scene. Celt has crafted a modern fairy tale that had me up from my chair in standing ovation." -- Sarah McCoy, New York Times and international best-selling author of The Mapmaker's Children "Gorgeous. The Daughters is lush and dreamy and strange, and it will make you feel like a beautiful witch has put you under a sinister spell." -- Katie Coyle, author of Vivian Apple at the End of the World "Filled with lyricism and imagery, this stunning debut novel...is sure to delight fans of magical realism." -- The Arizona Daily Star "Music and motherhood-that's what you'll find at the core of The Daughters, yet each element is so original, you'll swear you've never read about either before. This debut by Adrienne Celt reads like a warm, cherished folksong. " -- Bustle.com (Summer Reading Roundup) "A lush song of a book that understands the intertwined beauty and fear of motherhood and daughterhood." -- Caitlin Horrocks, author of This is Not Your City "Brimming with sad, delicious folklore and echoing with the voices of five generations of mothers and daughters in a family shaped by music as much as by tragedy, Celt's debut is enchanting." -- Sarah Cornwell, author of What I Had Before I Had You "[A] dazzling debut...The Daughters is about motherhood and daughterhood, of course, but also relationships and fidelity and music and ambition and talent and compromise and scary-ass Polish folktale witchery." -- Rachel Fershleiser "[D]azzling... Bouncing back and forth between past and present, The Daughters is a gorgeous, riveting story about family, mythology, and curses. Its dark, dizzying magic practically sings off the page." -- Liberty Hardy - Book Riot "Adrienne Celt's lushly imagined debut novel The Daughters...explores the themes of music, motherhood, and the unshakeable power of family lore in tandem... Like the mythical rusalka themselves, The Daughters is packed with dangerous beauty; it's an enchanting but powerful read." -- Caroline Goldstein - Bustle.com "Fans of folklore-based fiction like The Snow Child, The Great Glass Sea or Mr. Fox would enjoy Adrienne Celt's myth-steeped first novel, which wraps Polish folktales and a family curse over four generations of women... The Daughters is full of depictions of music and its power." -- BookPage "Celt's writing is lyric, and she paces the novel with careful placement of slow-but-foreboding scenes and sweeping, operatic ones... The final notes of The Daughters might surprise you, but in the end it's the journey through song and myth, the cost of motherhood and the price of passion, that will resonate long after the last page." -- Jenn Fields - Denver Post
