Visiting with me in a safe distanced interview is Rea Frey. Rea is the celebrated author of Not Her Daughter, Because You’re Mine, and Until I Find You as well as four nonfiction books, so she’s been around the publishing block. Her passions include telling stories, but she’s also the founder and CEO of Writeway, where aspiring writers become published authors.
SS: Rea, what did you want to grow…
I read Because You’re Mine, Rea Frey’s second novel, released on August 6, 2019 by St. Martin’s Griffin, because I enjoyed her debut novel, Not Her Daughter. Because You’re Mine is told from three points of view (Lee, the mother of Mason, a spectrum child; Noah, Mason’s tutor; and Grace, Lee’s best friend).
This book is a read-in-one-sitting page-turner. All the characters are…
Gripping, emotional, and wire-taut, Not Her Daughter raises the question of what it means to be a mother—and how far someone will go to keep a child safe.
Emma Townsend. Five years old. Gray eyes, brown hair. Missing since June.
Emma is lonely. Living with her cruel mother and clueless father, Emma retreats into her own world of quiet and solitude.
Sarah Walker. Successful entrepreneur. Broken-hearted. Kidnapper.
Sarah has never seen a girl so precious as the gray-eyed child in a crowded airport terminal. When a second-chance encounter with Emma presents itself, Sarah takes her—far away from home. But if it’s to rescue a little girl from her damaging mother, is kidnapping wrong?
Amy Townsend. Unhappy wife. Unfit mother. Unsure whether she wants her daughter back.
Amy’s life is a string of disappointments, but her biggest issue is her inability to connect with her daughter. And now Emma is gone without a trace.
As Sarah and Emma avoid the nationwide hunt, they form an unshakeable bond. But what about Emma’s real mother, back at home?
‘It’s all becoming sickeningly clear. Her daughter is missing, and it is her fault and her clueless husband’s who hadn’t thought to go outside to check on her. She’d locked the door again, when she could have left it open. Because she locked the door, her daughter is out there somewhere, five years old and alone’
One of the biggest questions featured in the plot of Not Her Daughter is whether kidnapping is still wrong if it is done for the right reasons.
Frey’s tale takes us down two different strains of narrative. The first, Sarah Walker, a successful entrepreneur who was abandoned by her mother at a young age as she pursued an acting career which, in my opinion, becomes one of the main motives behind her taking the young Emma Townsend from her home, family, and, most importantly, her mother. The second, Amy Townsend, mother to Emma, unhappy in her marriage living a life through a string of disappointments ranging from her marriage to her body image and ending at an inability to connect with her daughter. The narrative is then split further into ‘before’, ‘during’, and ‘after’, giving great insight in the psyche of each character.
I’m a bit biased at this point because split narratives are some of my favourite things in the world. Slaughterhouse Five is one of my favourite stories because of the unhinged way that the story is told. Whilst the narrative of Not Her Daughter isn’t a direct copy of this, the similarities is shares are endless and I think it was one of the many reasons that I enjoyed it. By having so many splits and jumps, it truly allows a reader to look deeper into what each character is going through and offers explanation behind why a character is the way that they are. For example, Sarah had a weak relationship with her mother thus making her need to take care of Emma easily explainable. The relationship between Amy and Richard offers insight into why her relationship with Emma is weak. Amy finds herself stuck in a loveless marriage where she isn’t able to live her life because her husband rarely helps take care of the children not to mention her relationship with her own mother which is briefly explored in later chapters.
Throughout my time reading the novel I was always wondering whether Sarah was doing the right or the wrong thing. On surface level it was kidnapping and therefore illegal and a part of me wanted Sarah to be caught just so Amy and Emma could be reunited after she was taken. However after reading about how Sarah took care of Emma in comparison to the way that Amy treated her, I knew that Sarah was the best option for her. I almost felt bad, in a way, for being on Sarah’s side but I couldn’t stop myself from rooting for Sarah and Emma to get away with it in the end. After dying their hair blonde the two were constantly thought to have a real mother/daughter relationship and, at least in my opinion, that’s what Emma deserved despite how she sometimes acted towards her own mother. There was one scene where it described how Emma screamed that she didn’t/never loved Amy which made me question whether the entirety of Emma’s stories were true and I almost felt bad for Amy. She was struggling to look after children, going through hypnotherapy, had a husband who just didn’t seem to care and a child that did everything she could to defy and ruin her. I need to point out that I am not endorsing or sympathising with Amy’s actions towards her daughter but Frey was able to make me feel sympathy for every character that she presented to her reader.
The only issue that I had with the narrative, without going into specific moments, was the ending. The pacing of the novel sped up towards the end as everything started to come together but the final few chapters, to me, felt rushed. The way that the cards laid at the end just seemed a little to easy, a little too perfect for the rest of the novel. Was I happy with what happened in the ending? Of course I was but my issue was the pace and the easiness with which everything happened.
It’s the speed of the ending which stopped me from giving this book a 5/5. I enjoyed almost everything about this book and the ending just comes about from me being incredibly picky and having my own ideas of where I thought the book was going to go. This, however, doesn’t ruin the story, or the issues that it deals with. Considering the story was wrote over the span of a month, the level of quality in this book is insurmountable. Frey does an amazing job of tackling a difficult subject, creating realistic characters and difficult situations beyond the central kidnapping idea, and I would be more than happy to recommend this book to one of my friends or anyone that was looking for a crime-esque novel to read.
NOT HER DAUGHTER WILL BE RELEASED 21 AUGUST 2018 AND WILL BE AVAILABLE FROM AMAZON, BARNES AND NOBLE, INDIEBOUND, BOOKS-A-MILLION ETC.
