Weaving seamlessly back and forth in time, The Daisy Children by Sofia Grant is a multi-generational novel that is based on a real life tragedy.

In 1937, several young lives are tragically taken when a gas leak causes an explosion at their school. Several families immediately have “replacement” children which are referred to as the "Daisy Children". Caroline and Hugh Pierson are one of the families whose “replacement” daughter Margaret is quite willful and stubborn which often puts her at odds with her mother. As an adult, Georgina’s memories of her childhood are dramatically different from Margaret’s and her mother is somewhat flabbergasted at some of Georgina’s accusations.

Margaret ends up making an impetuous decision to marry a man who cannot forget his family’s loss in the explosion and their union is passionate yet volatile. Margaret’s relationship with her daughter, Georgina, is deeply troubled which results in a lifelong estrangement after Georgina leaves home. Georgina’s relationship with her daughter, Katie, is also dysfunctional, but Katie is willing to overlook her mother’s more annoying traits. After Margaret passes away, will her surprise bequests to Katie and Katie's cousin Scarlett repair the long running rift in their family?

The inheritance comes at a good time for Katie since she at loose ends and could use some time away from home. Her trip hits quite a few snags and once she arrives in Texas, this hiatus from Boston proves to be quite the catalyst for future changes. Her marriage to her husband, Liam, is not in a good place but it takes distance from her regular life to gain much needed perspective to view her marriage (and her husband) more clearly.

Katie is surprised by how much she enjoys spending time with Scarlett as they work together to fulfill the stipulations of Margaret’s will. As she and Scarlett clean out Margaret’s home, there are a few surprises awaiting them. Letters hint at family secrets and Katie hopes to glean some background information on her mother’s relationship with Margaret. Katie clearly sees her mother's flaws and their relationship works best with Katie spending minimal time with Georgina.

With real life events serving as the story’s backdrop, The Daisy Children is an engaging and interesting novel. The women in the Pierson family are not exactly the warm and cuddly types but some of their standoffishness is understandable given their family history. With some unexpected twists and turns, Sofia Grant brings this multi-layered novel to an uplifting conclusion that will delight readers.
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I loved this book - since i live in Texas nearby the location of the events this book is based on. I found that the author was very accurate with her facts regarding the explosion. I was glad to read that her idea of the Daisy Children (replacement children) was fictional because I kept thinking I had never heard the term Daisy Children before. I loved reading about towns I've lived in and visited- its so rare to find a book that is set in East Texas - although i did find it comical to think of an Amazon fulfillment center coming to New London, TX. ( )

FICTION
Sofia Grant
The Daisy Children: A Novel
William Morrow
Trade paperback, 978-0-0626-9344-1 (also available as an e-book and an audio-book), 432 pgs., $15.99
August 2018

Katie Garret is having a bad week — she’s been fired from her marketing design position; she’s failed to get pregnant this month, too; and she just accepted delivery of her husband Liam’s new $240 trousers. Then her mother, Georgina (a real piece of work, this one), calls to tell her that Grandma Margaret has died and Katie is named in the will. Katie, newly unemployed and un-enamored with her husband, decides to make the trip from Boston to rural East Texas, a kind of vacation from her real life. “She’d have a baby when she was meant to,” Katie thinks. “She’d get to New London and discover she’d inherited a fortune, or a pittance; she’d go to Dallas and bond with her mother or argue with her. All of it would be fine.”

But even after the mugging and the appearance of astonishing cousin Scarlett and being mistaken for a vagrant and then a burglar and uncovering the clues that gradually reveal generations of family secrets that echo loudly into the present, Katie is worrying about the wrong things. “The thing she really ought to be worrying about,” Grant writes, “was that Texas would seep into her pores and take root.”

The Daisy Children: A Novel is new fiction from Sofia Grant, whom y’all probably know better as Sophie Littlefield, author of more than two dozen books in many genres including YA, apocalyptic fiction, thriller, domestic suspense, and women’s fiction, this last being assigned to The Daisy Children metadata. This is unfairly reductive; what it should say is a carefully and elegantly constructed exploration of a hundred years of dysfunctional family relationships, the nature of secrets, and the potential for healing.

When Littlefield became interested in writing historical fiction, she became Grant, deciding a name change made sense in this departure from her previous work. The Daisy Children is inspired by the 1937 New London, Texas, school explosion, about which Grant read a nonfiction account and was touched and intrigued by the story of those who survived it. She began wondering how the community might have changed and adapted in the years that followed.

The third-person narration moves back and forth in time in alternating chapters, a four-dimensional story in which you can feel the puzzle pieces locking firmly into place. Part contemporary fiction, part historical, The Daisy Children is fast and evenly paced; the clues are well placed; and the many plot twists, both large and small, propel the action effectively.

Contemporaneously with the explosion, East Texas experienced an oil boom in the twentieth century that, for a while anyway, transformed the economy and introduced new class dynamics, which play an important part in both the daily functioning of the households and in the larger questions of chance, fate, and worthiness when tragedy strikes.

Grant’s women characters are distinctive personalities with complicated emotional lives, complex back stories, and rich details that reveal their essence. For example, Scarlett has a tattoo of monkeys — plastic monkeys from the Barrel of Monkeys game — “linked by their tails, frolic[king] across her collar bones … disappearing into her tank top at the armholes.” This tattoo tells you much of what you need to know of the essence of Scarlett.

The flaws of The Daisy Children are small: the men are not as vital or complex as the women; the speed of development of a new love interest strikes me as a false note, seemingly out of character for the couple as individuals. In comparison to its entertaining charm and engaging, sleight-of-hand technique for introducing some of life’s biggest questions, these flaws are insignificant.

Grant’s vibrant style is often humorous, sometimes drolly amusing (bereavement “sounded old-fashioned, like pinafore”), sometimes tongue-in-cheek, sometimes the equivalent of slapstick, sometimes arch and biting. The perfect blending of all of these is the child Margaret, a combination of Nellie Oleson and Harriet the Spy.

The waste of years and human potential is heartbreaking — all the lost opportunities to atone for, to forgive, to gather and in so doing create strength not possible alone, to be a family. Katie confronts a turning point, the proverbial fork in the road — who are you now? Who are you going to be?

Originally published in Lone Star Literary Life. ( )

Such a sad story based on an actual event. ( )

Interesting concept for a novel. Uneven execution. Based on a real-life tragic event, but as a romance not historical fiction. Too much of the book read like it was just written as filler. ( )