Yes, My Darling Daughter by Margaret Leroy (2009)Four-year-old Sylvie is a puzzle. Besides her sickening fear of water and nightmares, there are her odd allusions to a house where she lived once, in a place she identifies with a magazine picture of an Irish fishing village in Connemara, far from the English flat where she has, in fact, always lived quietly with her unmarried mother, Grace. Sylvie’s oddities alienate their friends, cause daycare to expel her, force Grace to quit her much needed job, and--worst--make Grace feel harrowingly bereft of her own child. After other desperate measures, she agrees to take Sylvie to Connemara under the supervision of Adam, a Psychic Institute researcher who believes Sylvie experienced a trauma there in a past life. A Connemara cottage which Sylvie joyfully reclaims as “my house" belonged to a troubled woman named Alice who disappeared seven years ago with her daughter. To solve the mystery of Sylvie’s eccentricity, Adam and Grace must uncover the truth about Alice—a labor fraught with peril, since Alice’s foe lives on.
Though Gothic conventions flourish in the seaside episodes, Leroy’s psychological realism, especially in depicting Grace’s maternal distress and growing attraction to Adam, keeps the novel fresh and suspenseful, her musical prose and sensuous descriptions (tulips are “bright toy-soldier red,” and a store purchase goes into “lots of whispery tissue paper”) a constant delight. She resembles Daphne Du Maurier and Anne Rivers Siddons as vivid stylists who specialize in psychological anomalies and high-pitched drama.
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