The Daughter Game

by Kate Long

By Hannah Astill

Following on from her first novel, The Bad Mothers Handbook (that became both a number one bestseller and had adaptations in radio and television), Kate Long’s fourth novel The Daughter’s Game follows on from some very successful footsteps.

However the book triumphs in its own right, this time delving into a deeper, much darker world than its infamous predecessor, focusing on the personal effects of a breakdown, the desperation of the inability to have children and the difficulties of forbidden, entangled relationships. 

The novel follows the life of 42 year old Anna Long, whose roles in life as a wife, a teacher, a wannabe mother, a da

ughter and a mistress are, although many, completely unsatisfactory. In every area of her life she struggles to maintain and find any sort of happiness, the consistency of her dissatisfaction acting as a catalyst to nothing short of a mid-life crisis.

In the midst of this chaos however is Kali, one of Anna’s pupils; a sixteen year old whose situation, not entirely dissimilar to her own upbringing, inevitably and dangerously draws Anna in. Such is Anna’s involvement however that the relationship between the both of them becomes dangerous. For Anna, Kali begins to transform into the daughter she hasn’t been able to have, the surrogate child that she is so hungrily in need of. Ultimately Anna recognises a cry for help and mistakes it as being the answer to her maternal desperation.

The book tackles some difficult issues but does so with conviction and dignity. The complexity of Anna’s mind and her psychological instability can sometimes be hard to digest but both show Long’s ability in portraying a real situation, however disturbing. It is this lack of restraint, and her use of the melancholic that aids Anna’s story and as a whole, the book’s success.