The Stepdaughter by Caroline Blackwood

A wicked stepmother finds her ideal prey in Carlone Blackwood's “quite brilliant” (The Times) debut.

A lavish Upper West Side apartment is the site of a familial cold war about to enter a phase of dangerous escalation.

J is a lonely woman without even the luxury of being alone. Her husband has fled to Paris with his latest flame, but he’s left J not only with their own four-year-old daughter, Sally Ann, but with the sulky cake-mix addicted, thirteen-year-old Renata, a leftover from his previous marriage. The presence of a pert au pair, Monique, serves only to make J feel more isolated and self-conscious. What she’d like is someone to blame.

Writing letters in her head to imaginary friends, J delights in dwelling on the hapless Renata, who “invites a kind of cruelty.” This is an invitation J fully intends to take up—and like so many stepmothers before her, she will find that wickedness, once indulged, is a difficult habit to kick. A mordant black splinter of a book, Caroline Blackwood’s first novel stands as proof positive of her eternal mastery—and mockery—of the darkest depths of human feeling.

REVIEWS

“Contained and ferocious, at once disarmingly and ambiguously candid about blistering feelings which are made to seem commonplace and all the more frightening for that.” ― Times Literary Supplement

“The Stepdaughter is the perfect book for people who find Joan Didion too even-keeled, Renata Adler too fair-minded . . . In its own way, it’s a perfect novel . . . Blackwood’s best book . . . It deserves to be a cheeky summer hit.”  ― Los Angeles Review of Books

“Caroline the pessimist made the world a happier place to be in because she could make mocking music of its terrors.” -- Jonathan Raban

PRODUCT DETAILS
Paperback with French flaps
Publisher: McNally Editions
ISBN: 978-1961341128
Pages: 112