49 pages • 1 hour read
Megan MirandaDaughter of Mine
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Impacts of Childhood Abandonment
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses death by suicide and drug addiction.
Multiple characters in the novel are dealing with the effects of having been abandoned by their caretakers as children, and this drives their behavior in unfortunate ways in the years that follow. When Caden sees his mother die, he experiences night terrors for some time afterward. He also carries a sense of guilt for Libby’s disappearance. His animosity toward Hazel is incomprehensible until he belatedly confesses that he felt responsible for driving Hazel’s mother away. He thought that telling her about Audrey’s earlier death had frightened her into fleeing. Thus, Hazel is a reminder of his failure, and he hates her for returning to town to remind him of it.
Nico is also hurt by what he perceives as his father’s abandonment through suicide. He erroneously believes that the murder room photos are evidence of his father’s crimes. Consequently, Nico conceals a key piece of information from Hazel regarding Libby’s submerged car to protect his father’s reputation. The doubt that Nico feels toward his father translates into self-doubt that makes him believe Hazel could never love the son of a murderer. Skyler appears to have been abandoned as well after Jamie disappears, and Hazel projects her own past misery on her little niece. Hazel is the clearest example of abandonment, and she is well aware of the toll her mother’s absence has taken on her psyche:
I had been built by my mother’s absence. Had grown out of its shock. The worst thing I could imagine had happened […] My mother abandoned me in the most public and shameful way. She took what she could, and she left everything else behind (113).
Hazel defines herself by her mother’s absence. Having been left behind as an unnecessary reminder of Libby’s past, she doubts her value. While Hazel recognizes the formative influence that abandonment has had on her life, she fails to see that it also provides the motivation necessary to pierce the veil of appearances. Hazel is driven to find out the truth about her mother’s absence.
While everyone else in town is willing to avoid the subject, Hazel has something to prove. She feels much the same way about Skyler and Jamie, not wanting to see her niece suffer as she did. Thus, Hazel persists until she tracks Jamie down and restores her to her family. She also persists until she exposes Roy’s crimes and proves that Libby never abandoned her at all. In the process, she also rescues Mirror Lake from its abandonment of the truth for the sake of comforting appearances.
Dangers of Small-Town Communities
Daughter of Mine devotes a good deal of attention to the dynamics of small-town life. Hazel says, “In a small town, every interaction carries weight. Everyone cares more. They know more. They remember more. They doubt and distrust more” (133). For much of her life, Hazel has been subjected to the scrutiny and judgment of everyone in Mirror Lake. Once the story spreads that her mother embezzled money from Roy’s firm and then left town, Hazel has been labeled as the daughter of a con artist. It doesn’t matter that her stepfather is a member of law enforcement. The stain of Libby’s bad behavior follows Hazel wherever she goes. Hazel has internalized this judgment and condemns herself as the daughter of a grifter. Her only escape from both the opinions of the neighbors and her own self-doubt is to leave town. This strategy works as long as she can keep her distance, but Perry’s death brings her right back into the same negative conditions that she hoped to permanently discard.
While appearances tend to reinforce Hazel’s bad opinion of herself and her mother, the novel’s central premise is that things aren’t always as they seem. Making snap judgments based on appearances is often wrong. Of course, Hazel has been conditioned to accept superficial assessments because she is surrounded by law enforcement personnel. Both in her family and in the surrounding community, police officers and detectives abound. They conduct their investigations by collecting facts. That these facts may not add up when viewed from a distance never occurs to them.
Such a limited perspective makes it easy for someone like Roy to exploit everyone in town by manipulating appearances. He is a pillar of the community. Nobody doubts the local lawyer, while a grifter like Libby Sharp is immediately suspect. If Roy says that Libby embezzled from his firm, the police are likely to assess the word of each based on past events. Libby was once a con artist. Roy is an upstanding citizen. The facts would seem to speak for themselves, but the facts are wrong. Libby has mended her way while Roy has concealed his crimes. Embezzlement, drug dealing, and murder are all part of his repertoire, but nobody would believe that. The small community of Mirror Lake favors stability. An opinion, once formed about a person, tends to stick. In the prologue, Hazel warns that something “quieter, but no less dangerous” is occurring (2). This quiet-but-dangerous description also works to characterize Mirror Lake, placing the novel firmly in the small-town mystery genre.
The Importance of Uncovering Concealed Truth
The truth is literally concealed then revealed by the lake that gives the town its name. Like the drought that forces decades-old evidence to the surface, Hazel’s return to Mirror Lake uncovers truths that have been long-hidden.
The people in Mirror Lake tend to judge by appearances, and so what appears to be true is all that matters. People live or die by their reputations. This is doubly true of the law enforcement officers in the town. Perry Holt is revered for his upstanding behavior. As Hazel will later discover, this perception of Perry is wrong. While he is a good man who tries to do right, he isn’t beneath concealing evidence that might reflect badly on him. When he collides with his wife on her bicycle, Perry doesn’t want to face the consequences. He cannot afford to sacrifice his reputation for the sake of the truth. Perry also fears losing his sons as a result. In Mirror Lake, fathers and sons support each other by colluding in cover-ups. Seven-year-old Gage and five-year-old Caden are sworn to secrecy after witnessing their mother’s death. As they grow into men, they continue this damaging pattern. Hazel says: “I thought of my brothers, afraid to dig any deeper. Nico, hiding his suspicions. All these sons, covering up for the sins of their fathers. Keeping their secrets, without even asking for the truth. All these things they didn’t truly want to know” (300).
As Hazel’s comment suggests, reputation matters more than truth, and she makes a gendered distinction when she says, “Daughters are different” (300). She isn’t afraid to expose embarrassing truths about her father, because she doesn’t identify with him in the same way that Gage or Caden does. They aspire to become their father someday. Presumably, Nico shares the same identification with his own father. He hid his knowledge of Libby’s car at the bottom of the lake, fearing that his own father might have been implicated in her disappearance.
Perry tacitly understands this difference between sons and daughters because he left the house and its contents to Hazel. All the evidence she needs to solve the mysteries of the past is concealed within its walls. Perry already knows that his sons would flinch from discovering the truth because they want to protect the legacy of his shining reputation. Perry also knows Hazel’s profession as a home renovator gives her the perfect set of skills to unearth the truth hidden within the structure of the house.
