SOURCE: Cooke, Judy. “Past Imperfect.” New Statesman and Society 5, no. 223 (9 October 1992): 34.

In the following review, Cooke praises Daughters of the House for a satisfying plot, complex characters, lyrical prose, and psychological insight.

Daughters of the House begins with a full-blown nightmare, the image of a woman with dead, bleeding feet who clutches “a red handbag … full of shreds of dead flesh”. Starting awake, Léonie runs to the bathroom gagging, feeling that it is her cousin Thérèse, expected home soon after many years in a convent, whom she is vomiting out. Threatened by real and symbolic manifestations of an unmother—a corpse, a nun—she feels compelled to discover the origin of her fear. What secrets in her family are hidden in her past?

In every way, the personalities and morality of “the daughters” are at odds. As a child, Léonie was granted a true...