BLURB:

The Perfect Daughter is a thriller that explores the truth or lies behind a teenage girl’s multiple personality disorder, from D.J. Palmer, the author of The New Husband.

Grace never dreamt she’d visit her teenaged daughter Penny in the locked ward of a decaying state psychiatric hospital, charged with the murder of a stranger. There was not much question of her daughter’s guilt. Police had her fingerprints on the murder weapon and the victim’s blood on her body and clothes. But they didn’t have a motive.

Grace blames herself, because that’s what mothers do—they look at their choices and wonder, what if? But hindsight offers little more than the chance for regret.

None of this was conceivable the day Penny came into her life. Then, it seemed like a miracle. Penny was found abandoned, with a mysterious past, and it felt like fate brought Penny to her, and her husband Arthur. But as she grew, Penny’s actions grew more disturbing, and different “personalities” emerged.

Arthur and Grace took Penny to different psychiatrists, many of whom believed she was putting on a show to help manage her trauma. But Grace didn’t buy it. The personas were too real, too consistent. It had to be a severe multiple personality disorder. One determined psychiatrist, Dr. Mitch McHugh, helped discover someone new inside Penny—a young girl named Abigail. Is this the nameless girl who was abandoned in the park years ago? Mitch thinks Abigail is the key to Penny’s past and to the murder. But as Grace and Mitch dig deeper, they uncover dark and shocking secrets that put all their lives in grave danger. 

MY THOUGHTS:

Thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for letting me read this book prior to its publication. My opinion is 100% honest, unbiased, and my own.

Reading this book has been quite the rollercoaster. It started right on the action, then it slowed down, and then the ending was so fast that you didn’t really see anything coming. I was debating whether to give this book 3 or 4 stars, because it was a really interesting story, but sometimes it read like a psychiatry textbook. Sometimes the feeling was, is this a novel or a lecture on multiple personality disorder? The reason why I finally settled on giving this book 4 stars was because I couldn’t have predicted that ending in a million years. At first it felt random, but then you start to reconsider matters and it makes sense.

I requested this book because it presented an interesting premise, although I’m always cautious with books that deal with mental health issues. More often than not the topic is treated in a shallow, banal, and convenient way, which makes me mad, but it wasn’t the case in this book. So kudos to the author for achieving something many have failed before. At least in my opinion.

All the characters were very well defined and fleshed out, each one with their very distinctive voices, and each one making you feel something different, taking you through different venues while reading the book. Their actions, their words, their personalities… every single aspect adds to the suspense of the story. Whenever I read a thriller story, I like to try to guess who did it; in this case it was impossible for me to guess it right, even though I thought I had it all figured out a couple of times. I love that in a book. Predictable plots bore me to death.

Overall, a very interesting and thrilling book that make you think about a mental disorder that is not that commonly treated in novels. Can a person with multiple identities be accountable for a murder? It’s a really good question, one that I had never considered before.

So grab a copy of this book, cozy up in the sofa, and prepare yourself for quite a ride.

So, for all of that, I give this book… 4 TEA CUPS!