The Whitsun Daughters is a juxtaposition of both historical and modern-day women’s issues.  Through the use of a common lineage the story is told of an unwanted pregnancy in the early 1900’s by an immigrant arranged marriage and a modern-day unplanned teenage pregnancy.

Admittedly, I struggled to get invested in this story at first.  The prologue was written in a very lyrical nature and I found it slightly confusing and hard to read.  However, after reading more of the book I came to realize that the cadence and rhythm of the text was related more to aligning with the speech patterns of a historical Irish speaker then it was a writing style, per se.  By midway through the book, I found it much easier to read the sections written in this lyrical style and found myself better able to imagine the historical character in time and place.

The more modern aspects of the book also lent themselves to an interesting dynamic.  The sisters in this book are as different as night and day.  I appreciated that they author didn’t have them all getting along famously, nor were they constantly at odds.  Instead, they were very much how I imagine real sisters are with ebbs and flows to their relationships and how they interact together.  I also appreciated that the cast of characters outside of the sisters was kept small.  For a book dealing with such mature and controversial topics it was nice to have a small band of characters to follow and not a wider cast to keep track of.

While the book is on the shorter side at 209 pages, I felt they were packed pages.  The story itself does not encompass large swaths of time, but rather shorter periods both then and now.  However, the author covers a lot of ground within those tight time periods and yet is still able to give the ending of the book a finality that does not feel hurried or incomplete.

Overall, this is an unbiased book for mature readers and would make a great discussion piece for a reading group, especially for women interested in discussing the topics of choice and children in modern times.

Review of an Advance Reading Copy

This book was sent to Compass Book Ratings for review by Dutton Books for Young Readers

Content Analysis:

Profanity/Language:  22 religious exclamations; 7 mild obscenities; 9 religious profanities; 2 derogatory names; 43 scatological words; 30 anatomical terms; 54 f-word derivatives.

Violence/Gore:  Bruise; reports of death from car accidents, natural causes or unknown causes; multiple references to menstrual or blood in childbirth; girl commits suicide by drowning; almost drowning of girl in shipwreck; reference to murder without detail; pregnant woman falls breaking leg; verbal threat; recall of man beating woman without detail. 

Sex/Nudity:  Three references to picture of male genitalia; crude terms used to describe female body parts during childbirth; naked man with minimal detail; 2 page scene of intense kissing, fondling and penetration of female; inference of rape recalled; two references to people having sex without detail; four instances of kissing; hand-holding; teenage girl gives 19 year old male hand job; hands on back and waist; 7 instances of implied sexual activity between adults; 2 page sex scene between 15 year old female and 19 year old male with minimal-moderate detail; 2 men masturbate together; 1 page sex scene between two men with minimal detail.

Mature Subject Matter:

Death, mental illness, abortion, marriage infidelity, abandonment, rape (inference), suicide, homosexuality.

Alcohol / Drug Use:

Adults and teens drink various forms of alcohol and use various forms of tobacco.