October Book Club - Book - The Faraday Girls

So, I just finished reading my book club book of the month - "The Faraday Girls" by Monica McInerney and have to say it was definitely a winner. I really liked the story, it kept me reading, but I wasn't absolutely crazy about the ending.

The book is about the Faraday family - Leo, the eccentric father and widower; Juliet, Miranda, Eliza, Sadie and Clementine, the motherless daughters and Maggie Faraday, Clementine's illegitimate daughter.

"As a child, Maggie Faraday grew up in a lively, unconventional household in Tasmania, with her young mother, four very different aunts and eccentric grandfather. With her mother often away, all four aunts took turns looking after her – until, just weeks before Maggie’s sixth birthday, a shocking event changed everything.
Twenty years on, Maggie is living alone in New York City when a surprise visit from her grandfather brings a revelation and a proposition to reunite the family. As the Faradays gather in Ireland, Maggie begins to realise that the women she thought she knew so intimately all have something to hide…"

Part One of the book introduces us to the family as a whole and the dynamics which make up the family. Juliet, tries to make everything right and buries herself in cooking for the family when things get rough; Miranda is all about herself and thinks she deserves more in life; Eliza is obsessed with working out and keeping in shape, Sadie is quiet and feels left out and different from everyone else, while Clementine is the baby and pretty much lives as the baby of the family oft does almost clueless to what is going on around them only interested in their own lives, but not in a selfish manner, just that this is how things go and they should continue especially when everyone older helps make it this way. Leo is a widower who is still very much in love with his dead wife, still talks to her and tries to carry on what he thinks as her traditions and misses her deeply.

Part One goes on to introduce Clementine's unplanned pregnancy and the family's gathering around her to help her get through it and raising her child while she is able to still fulfill her dreams of finishing school and having a career. It brings up journals/diaries which their mother used to keep and how since Clementine doesn't really remember her mom, these might be something good to read, as well as the other sisters reading them as a way to remember there mom and the way she was. When they approach Leo with this idea, he gets really upset and shoots it down, saying it's not their place to read the mother's intimate thoughts and any way he had burned them a long time ago following a request by the mother that if she passed away before him that he would burn them.

The sisters and Leo then gather around Clementine saying that it's ok and that they will be there for her and the baby always - it will be a family effort but as things settle in, she has the baby and life moves on they still help out as a whole but also begin to do not as much or think more of themselves once again living their lives. Except Sadie who goes beyond just helping and gives up all that she has (school, friends, etc.) to help raise Maggie. This is where you begin to see that Sadie has been feeling left out of the family, like an outsider, and at odds with them as she seems to fall into the role of "mother" to Maggie a little bit to much. There is an instance where she is confused as Maggie's mother and she mentions it to Clementine, who gets upset but doesn't stop Sadie from basically being the nanny to Maggie while she goes about her schooling and hanging out with friends (she still is a mother to Maggie, but she also does the other things). After this, the next time when Sadie and Maggie are on a little day trip in another town close by and are mistaken for mother/daughter, Sadie does not mention it and actually continues to go back to the town to join in mother/daughter groups pretending to be Maggie's mother. While Sadie is spending the time with Maggie around the house and doing things, she finds the supposedly burned journals/diaries and begins to read them. Finding out interesting things about their mother.

The arrangement of the sister's helping - with the majority being Sadie goes on up to the point where before Maggie's sixth birthday things come to a head. Even before this the family had begun to go their own way and want to start their own lives and not be a welded together all the time as a family unit. After the indiscretion, Sadie drops out altogether from the family unit.

While reading about the way Leo spoke about his wife and then a couple of the memories of the older daughters I began to feel that Leo was, while a very nice guy, very naive. I didn't get the impression that his wife was all bad or anything like that, but I could tell that there were things that didn't bring the impression of an angel which he seemed to remember her being. It made me think that she had some definite problems - maybe manic depressive - or was a very selfish human being.

After reading what happens before Maggie's 6th birthday, we then enter Part Two and find Maggie in New York where she has escaped after experiencing a tragedy at her job in London and a devastating truth in her personal relationship. We still get little snippets of the other members of the family but a lot of it is focused on Maggie and how she deals and copes with things and her meeting a new fellow. I found this part to be interesting, though I kept feeling that she had to have some type of inner problem if she took the job instance so deeply to heart with blaming herself as much as she did. I mean it was an awful thing, but was it really her fault and did she have to take on so much of the blame?

To top all this off, her grandfather comes to New York to ask her to read her dead grandmother's journals as he is to afraid to since there are things he doesn't want to find out or get hurt by - this further proved to me that he was living under a rock and probably always had when it came to the true character of his wife. Ah, the old saying - blinded by love. He is trying to find out what Sadie could have read in the journals that might have made her do what she did and also to find out why she left the family and never contacted them again except for birthday cards to Maggie. I also found it odd that he wanted Maggie to do this so as to spare his daughters from anything which I guess is a good thing, but made me mad because if he hadn't always deluded himself about his wife they wouldn't have thought her to be a saint.

Anyways, Maggie reads the diaries and she eventually meets up with her Aunt Sadie who has been tracked down by a private investigator hired by Leo. Maggie is to meet this person they think is Sadie and confirm it for Leo. Maggie meets up with Sadie and they talk. We also find out that Sadie has been living a lie herself, she's been lying all these years to her husband and daughter about who she is and where she came from and her background. I was a little mad about that as well and didn't think that it was fair to her husband at all - at the end it doesn't get revealed and Maggie abids by Sadie's wishes to not let Leo or the rest of the family know where she is - another secrete still intact - grrr.

While the family is meeting in Ireland for their July Christmas a number of things are revealed or actually they are revealed prior to the meeting to the reader about each of the sisters and then we are told about the tension that is in the house, etc.

I was disappointed that nothing was really totally resolved by the family tension that they didn't really addresses it, it just continues to be hidden. There was a little bit of a blow out and Maggie actually gets visits from each of her aunts after this, but once again nothing is brought totally out in the open. This I didn't like. This may be because I have become very outspoken in my later years and feel that it is ok for me to express what I feel and how I feel about things and the way people in my family act. I'm sure there are plenty of times my family would like me to just shut up about a lot of it and just let things go, but that's me - lovely. I actually do know a family a little like this. They are very friendly and loving and you definitely have a good time with them, but I don't know if I've ever seen them really get to the heart of things - I feel they just let everything slide by and never get into serious discussions about the way this person or that person made them feel bad or disrespected them. For me it's very irritating to watch and there are times I want to say something, but know it's not my place. Just cause I handle things one way doesn't make it the right way and their family seems to have been going on like this for ages and surviving.

It did have a happy ending as in Maggie found a guy who was good to her and seemed like he would be good for her. Juliet and her husband were talking and working things out. The rest of the sisters seemed to have their issues pretty much remain the same.

I'm probably just a witch cause I wanted to see some real conflict, I wanted someone to just tell Miranda really off and say how pretenious she was and that she wasn't really all that, I wanted someone to tell Juliet to get her head out of the sand and to stand up for herself, I wanted someone to confront Eliza about her affair. I really wanted someone to wake up Leo to the fact that the mother was a loser! But, I know that these things shouldn't always happen, that what was the harm in letting the father in his old age remember his wife anyway he wanted to, that after all that he had probably put up with, because I really don't think he didn't know some of what was going on when it happened, but just chose to turn a blind eye towards it - I'm sure he suffered in his own way. I'm sure he had his doubts, but he didn't want to confront them and find it out. Now me, I dig and I dig and I want to find out the answers I want to try and prove that a person is doing me wrong and I actually have, but I still ended up turning a blind eye on numerous occassions and let that person keep hurting me - such low self esteem - it's so sad. I hope that my niece and my nephew don't grow up with these issues. Ah, maybe another blog topic?

I would recommend this book to others as a good read. I found it enjoyable. It shows how families can be together and be dysfunctional, know each other and really not know each other; how secrets can bind and destroy; love and despise each other - all of this at the same time.

We meet on Tuesday, October 30 as a group to discuss this and I will follow up with what the others thought. I will also provide the recipes for dinner that evening - sloppy joes and scalloped potatoes.