Guest Review by Pam: Owen’s Daughter by Jo-Ann Mapson

 Owen’s Daughter
written by Jo-Ann Mapson
published by Bloomsbury 2014

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Did I enjoy this book: I always enjoy reading redemption stories. When characters I loved from other books weave into the redemption, I’m blissed.

Jo-Ann Mapson gives us Skye Elliott, a smart, sad, tough, and persevering hero in Owen’s Daughter. Skye is really, really smart, and she almost makes it out of her teenaged years intact . . . and then, at the eleventh hour, she meets Rocky. Just in time to make her a mama, shut down her dream of veterinary school, put her on a spiraling-downward path.

But Skye is a tough and persevering soul, driven by mother love, and fueled by her own intelligence and severe sense of right and wrong.

Which one of us doesn’t know a smart, tough, sassy woman who’s made abominable choices early on? We know some who never rebounded, but we also know some who measured the distance from the bottom of the pit to the sky outside and started climbing. Sometimes it took them more than one attempt. Lordie, sometimes they were climbing for years, but they stayed with it. And they got out.

 

Would I recommend it: This is just the kind of book to fall into on a blustery fall night. Pull an afghan snug in the cozy chair and enjoy the company of Mapson’s quirky characters. They’re all flawed, but they’re all loveable . . . and they surprise us with their ability to rise to the occasions. Owen’s Daughter is like a Friday night chat with warm, good friends.

 

~ Pam, guest reviewer & EFC Short Story Contest Winner ~

 

About the book – from Goodreads: Two women – one a young mother newly out of rehab, the other just diagnosed with a progressive disease – must carve out new lives for themselves in a changing landscape.

Skye Elliot is given a choice after her car accident—jail or rehab—and her ex-husband, a bull rider who introduced her to the party scene, gets custody of their four-year-old daughter Gracie. It takes Skye eight months to get clean, but the day she is released, she has one plan: to be a good mother—better, at least, than Skye’s own selfish mother and absent dad.

Owen Garret hasn’t seen his daughter in ten years. He, too, needs to make amends. Newly out of prison, he picks her up from rehab and together they set off to find Gracie, and to forge a relationship that transcends the hurt and anger that have brewed between them for almost a decade. In the meantime, they find Margaret Yearwood, too—Owen’s lost love whom he left when he turned himself in for a long-ago crime.

Owen’s Daughter is a stand-alone novel that brings back characters from Mapson’s treasured novel Blue Rodeo, and introduces them to the beloved cast of Solomon’s Oak and Finding Casey. With its father-daughter story and characters who overcome personal failings against great odds, Owen’s Daughter is a story of love and family that will enchant Mapson fans both old and new.