Letter to My Daughter: Review and Giveaway

Think about the letters you've saved over the years. Are they love letters? Are they the letters you got from home during your first summer away at camp? Do you have a box full of letters from best friends, full of events and compliments, or acceptances to schools or for jobs? You probably saved these letters because they touched your emotions when you first read them. Chances are good that they still affect you when you reread them.

An epistolary novel is a fictional book written as a series of documents, usually letters, although diary or journal entries, newspaper clippings, and other documents are sometimes used. In recent times, electronic "documents" such as email and even blogs have also come into use. The word 'epistolary' comes from the Latin word epistola, meaning a letter. The very first epistolary novel may have been the Spanish Prison of Love (Cárcel de amor) (c.1485) by Diego de San Pedro. Throughout the years, there have been countless books written in epistolary form, which became popular as a genre in the 18th century, fell largely out of use in the late part of that century, and then became popular again. Even Jane Austen tried her hand at epistolary writing, with her novella, Lady Susan, and Pride and Prejudice, which contains many letters, may have originally been intended as an epistolary novel called "First Impressions". Recently I read two epistolary books, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Schaffer and Annie Barrows (which I reviewed in epistolary form), and West From Home by Laura Ingalls Wilder (which I also reviewed). Epistolary novels often feel a bit more intimate, more revealing, and more passionate to me than regular novels, and I looked forward to reading a new book in this genre, Letter to My Daughter by George Bishop, published in 2010.

Letter to My Daughter is written as a letter from a distraught mother, Laura, to her daughter, Liz, on the eve of her fifteenth birthday. Liz has left home in the middle of the night in her mother's car after a fight with her. As Laura anxiously awaits her daughter's return, she writes a letter to Liz about her own past and the secrets she has kept hidden. In it, she reveals how at fifteen she fell in love with a Cajun boy, Tim Prejean, who was two years older than her. Her parents strongly disapproved of her relationship with Tim, and sent Laura away to a boarding school run by nuns, the Sacred Heart Academy in Baton Rogue. Tim has enlisted in the army during the era of the Vietnam War, and he and Laura continue their forbidden romance through letters in this coming-of-age story.

Imaginative and affecting, I was transfixed and transported by descriptions in Letter to My Daughter of rural Louisiana and could easily envision "the sticks" where "small houses stood scattered here and there among the trees" in a place with "dirt roads, dirt yards, and dirt gardens". The beauty of this book is in the details and the way the author captures feelings on paper (Tim's father, who lives in a camping trailer in the woods, is described as "desperately hospitable", offering can after can of RC Cola to Liz). Although it's short, the story is full of power and emotion. Like a treasured letter, this is a book to read and reread. It would be a very good choice for mother/daughter book clubs, and may even inspire some mothers to write letters to their own children--about things that are important but difficult to express face-to-face.

After reading Letter to My Daughter, I was curious about something and asked the author a couple of questions:

Why did you write Letter to My Daughter from the point of view of a woman, Liz's mother? What "advantages" and/or "disadvantages" did this give you as a writer?

Here is his reply:

Dear Suko's Notebook,

Thanks for hosting me here on your blog. Lots of readers have wondered about the female point of view in my novel Letter to My Daughter.

A few years ago I was working in India, and at the end of my job, I took a camel safari in the desert. I went to sleep in my tent one night, and I dreamed this whole novel, beginning to end. In my dream, the story was clearly told from the point of view of the mother. I heard the woman's voice, even. The odd thing is that I don't know anyone quite like Laura, the narrator in the story. She's not based on anyone in real life.

So I went into the novel with a strong sense of the voice and the story. Still, it took some time to overcome my doubts about writing from a woman's point of view. But eventually I realized that it wasn't all that different from a man's point of view. The big emotions--fear, love, hate, jealousy--are all the same no matter who you are. The challenge is in getting the details right--what a teenage girl sees when she looks at a boy she admires, for example. Things like this took some imagining. Happily, women who've read the novel seem to think I got it right.

~George Bishop

Fascinating! George, I enjoyed reading your answer in epistolary form.

Wonderful news! Random House is offering one copy of Letter to My Daughter as a giveaway (U.S./Canada).

• To enter the giveaway for this book, simply leave a comment.
• For another chance at winning, become a follower of this blog, or let me know that you're already a follower, or that you subscribe in Google Reader.
• For an additional chance, post about this contest on your blog, Facebook, or Twitter.
• For yet another chance, mention an epistolary book that you've enjoyed reading.

Enter by 5 PM PDT on Wednesday, June 2. One winner will be selected randomly and announced on Thursday, June 3. Good luck!



Special thanks to Lisa from TLC and Random House for sending me this book. For more reviews of this book, please visit the other stops on TLC's blog tour for Letter to My Daughter.