Review of The Good Daughter <\/em>by Harker Heights’ Alexandra Burt<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe dead sometimes remain and nothing good has ever come from sticking around.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Eighteen-year-old Dahlia Waller left the small East Texas town of Aurora right after high school graduation and never looked back. Fifteen difficult, disappointing years later she returns, moving in with her mother, Memphis, determined to finally get some answers to her past. Who is Dahlia\u2019s father? Why did she and her mother move so often, usually in the middle of the night (\u201canother one of her cloak-and-dagger operations\u201d)? Why did Dahlia not attend school until the eighth grade? Why did Memphis never sign a lease or take a job that required paperwork? \u201cThis child [Dahlia] has called on fate to stomp its foot, determined to resolve itself.\u201d <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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When Dahlia discovers the body of a woman half-buried alive in what locals call the \u201cWhispering Woods,\u201d she sets a series of events in motion that upend her life and the lives of everyone around her. The secrets her mother has kept for half a lifetime begin to emerge and unleash a chain of events that we\u2019re not sure they can survive. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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The Good Daughter: A Novel<\/span><\/a><\/em><\/strong> by <\/span>Alexandra Burt<\/span><\/a><\/strong> is an eerily atmospheric blend of mystery, suspense, and the paranormal. The Good Daughter<\/em> is an exploration of how the brain functions\u2014the generation and assimilation of emotions, the interpretation of sensory impressions, the power of suggestion, and the processes of memory, and asks, What do we owe the living and the dead? What is freedom, and does the truth truly set you free? <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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The narrative moves between Dahlia\u2019s first-person account and the third-person accounts of three other women: Memphis, her fragile mother (\u201cMemphis Waller is no longer a Pollock painting, full of vibrancy and complex colors. She is a mere watercolor image, watered down so much that she almost vanishes\u201d); Quinn, a damaged, unhappily married woman (\u201cinfertile <\/em>\u2026 as if she were a stretch of land without any rain, and littered with rocks\u201d); and Aella, a reclusive woman who lives in the woods \u201cwith potions and salves and bottles containing strange things.\u201d <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Well and intricately plotted, usually moving quickly, Burt\u2019s story spends as much time in the past as in the present. Subplots enrich and inform the main narrative, and well-placed clues (including the structure of the narratives themselves) tantalize. Burt occasionally strays into the purple (\u201cher pores fecund with the scent of transgression\u201d), but not often enough to distract. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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There\u2019s something about East Texas. If you\u2019ve spent time in the Big Thicket, or wandered off the trails around Caddo Lake, you know what I\u2019m talking about: a sometimes unsettlingly feeling of the primeval, of something gathering itself, of being observed by hidden eyes. This atmosphere inspires a subgenre I call East Texas Gothic. The Good Daughter<\/em> joins the ranks of Cynthia Bond\u2019s <\/span>Ruby<\/span><\/a><\/strong> <\/span><\/em>and Keija Parssinen\u2019s <\/span>The Unraveling of Mercy Louis<\/span><\/a><\/em><\/strong> as a great example of this. The Good Daughter<\/em> had me listening more closely to the sound of my home contracting in the cool of the night after a particularly warm February day, and doing double-takes at movement caught by the corner of my eye.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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