I don't know whether it is me or the book. Short stories need to have a pulse to keep going and make the reader invested in them, whether they are slow, or twist filled or whatever. However I found myself reading for the sake of reading. If you are keen on the book, I would advise reading a sample on Kindle before committing to it.

I never used to enjoy short stories but I have to say the shortened attention span that is sometimes around due to pandemic has helped me embrace the concept. Emma Cline really plunges you into the worlds of these very different characters and settings. The stories are evocative if bleak, looking underneath the veneer of certain aspects of American life. She is a fabulous writer but not sure this is her most uplifting work but they certainly help you understand why America is where it is.

With thanks to NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Emma Cline's sensitivity and moments of beauty create wonderful little stories. Talks about characters whose daily lives develop in disquiet and pain. America is full of wonderfully blended and culturally missed families seems a shame this had no culturally fused families.

I loved Clines first novel The Girls and had very high hopes for this.
This was a different novel to her first but still excellently written and very enjoyable. I really enjoy short stories and this was perfect and very compelling to read.

What a stunning short story collection. I loved Emma Cline's 'The Girls' and this more than lived up to expectation. A rich tapestry of stories exploring the nature of family, relationships & isolation. Many could be read a couple of times & each time you'd discover something new. I loved it.

I received an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to NetGalley, Chatto & Windus, and the author Emma Cline.
There’s no doubt that this book is very well written and engaging. The characters were well developed and the subjects of each of the stories were involving.
However I have to agree with some of the other reviewers, they all felt unfinished and unresolved. I’m sure this was deliberate on the author’s part, as it is the case for every story, but it made for a quite unsatisfying read. 3 stars.

Emma Cline’s new novel is a treasure trove of short stories about the darkness of relationships within a family or within a relationship. Cline ups the ante after her excellent novel The Girls, which was an excellent novel that haunts you long after the last chapter.

Using eloquence and a subtle style using a modern flourish rivals some of the Shirley Jackson’s domestic short stories. She places the reader in the middle of the situation and then you get so invested with the characters and Cline enraptures her audience with every nuance and word used to its full maximum emotional punch. Each narrative is beautifully written and displayed against a tawdry background of shadows and dark emotional centres.

The characters are all excellently written. The reader gets involved from the start to the end of each story. Cline leaves them hungering for more and this is what true great short story telling is. You hit the mark and when you finish the story, you want more of those characters. This does have a down fall because each story is so well crafted, you do want more and you can see each of these stories becoming their own full length novel. There is so much hidden depth in each character and passage that Cline only scratches the surface but enough so that you are left so intrigued.

Overall, Cline is showing the world that she is a power to be reckoned with and with her previous novel and now this collection of shorts; we are looking at maybe one of the greatest new writers emerging. Daddy is thought provoking, deeply emotionally enriched tour de force that never falters nor does it ever let off. Leaving the reader wanting more but given us enough to fully whet our appetite on what is to come. This is one of my own personal favourites and urges everyone to give this a read to see a new master at work.

Couldn't really get on with this which is disappointing as I adored The Girls.
The stories are well written but none of them have any real conclusion and just don't hit the mark for me.
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

Daddy by Emma Cline was really eagerly anticipated by so many people, following the huge success of her first novel, The Girls. Daddy is an assured short story collection by an extremely skilled writer, exploring power along the lines of gender, age and herarchies within families, friendships and working relationships.

It's easiest to see the connection to Cline's novel in stories narrated by young female protagonists, where sexual power dynamics with older or more worldly men is a driving force. This is most obvious in a story about an 11 and 13 girl living in a house with an older man who fascinates them, and onto whom at least one of them projects her first feelings of sexual curiosity. Their shortcuts to sexual maturity come by way of aesthetic references they have learned from stolen glances at pornographic material, and they attempt to craft their images into that if an object of desire instead of someone acting on that desire. Similarly, the final story in the collection is about a woman who gets off on catfishing people, pretending she is a naaive teen waiting to be taken advantage of or a man who is grooming a young woman.

These are the stories that most explicitly develop Cline's overarching theme of how men see women and how women see themselves through men. However, her stories narrated by older and lost men are also interesting in how they explore disconnections between fathers and their children and lack of understanding between people of different generations. Their dissatisfactions with their relationships and how they impact the people around them don't make for likable characters, but they do make for memorable ones.

This wasn't necessarily what I expected from the collection, and though it wasn't my favourite I can't fault Cline's writing at all, she is truly a force to be reckoned with.

After being blown away by The Girls, I’ve been waiting a long time to read something new from Emma Cline. Then Daddy came along and I felt a little bit nervous about picking it up. Why the nerves? If it didn’t live up to expectations, it might tarnish my memories of reading The Girls. This might seem strange. But, it’s something that has happened before when I’ve felt ‘let down’ by an author. Plus, they were short stories. Even though I enjoy these, they can be hit and miss – what if there were more misses than hits?

Thankfully, my worries were unjustified. Just like The Girls, Daddy was hard to put down. It was so well written, each story a snapshot of another, generally off-kilter world. I was drawn into each one, and a few I didn’t want to leave, even though the subject matter wasn’t alway pleasant or comfortable to read.

The first of these worlds was the first story in the book, ‘What Can You Do with a General’. In it, a father describes a family get together. He is so detached as he talks about how dysfunctional they are. It’s both sad and scary as he wonders why his children have turned out the way they have at the same time as not being able to acknowledge the damage he may have done to them growing up.

Los Angeles was another. A hopeful young actress, Alice, who decides life will be easier if she takes some risks to earn some quick money. Avoiding spoilers, I’ll just say things don’t turn out quite as she’d planned. I was amazed at how quickly I started to like Alice, and worry for her.

I didn’t like Kayla, the central character in The Nanny, though I did like this story. in it, a Nanny to a rich and famous man becomes embroiled in a scandal. Rather than shame, there is a sense of pride in what she has done. And opportunity. It is a slightly sly look at the world of celebrity culture and how you can become famous for not much at all.

Finally, there was Marion, which I had already read when it was published in the Paris Review. I loved Marion then and I really enjoyed it this second time. It is a flash back to The Girls, a story of young women exploring life and their sexuality in the fluid world of the 60s/70s. For those who haven’t read any Emma Cline, it’s a good place to start.

And, while – for me – not every story was as strong as the ones I’ve highlighted here, this is a really solid collection. One I’d recommend to anyone who enjoys short stories, or want an introduction to Emma Cline.

Emma Cline's Daddy is a cleverly written collection of short stories. Each one seems to have a strong masculine influence, if the story isn't told by a man then a man features in heavily within the context of the story.
They read like modern day fables with the author stopping short of telling the moral of each story, leaving this up to the reader.
Short stories can sometimes feel unfinished, but that's not the case with Daddy.

I was given a copy of Daddy by NetGalley and the publishers in return for an unbiased review.

Daddy is a series of ten short stories that delve right into the heart of character. The stories work well collected together, as each seems to address some darker menace hovering below the normal-looking surface of people’s lives. Each main character has such a specific outlook that behaviours others may recoil from are presented as almost inevitable, sometimes regrettable, but still somehow impossible to avoid.

A father erases his past violent behaviour through the filter of memory and the insistence upon his own change (‘What Can You Do with a General’). Another father, in ‘Northeast Regional’, goes to his son’s school to sort out what will happen after his son assaulted another pupil, all while he’s trying to text a married woman he’s having an affair with. He knows his son only vaguely and is cross when his son’s girlfriend doesn’t eat the food she ordered for lunch. The girlfriend drops her fork and the waitress comes to pick it up and give her another. In a line that seems to sum up the strange mutable sense of individual morality the collection explores, Cline writes:

‘When she retreated, leaving Richard alone with his son and the crying girl, it occurred to him, with the delayed logic of a dream, that the waitress must have thought he was the bad guy in all this.’

Not all of the protagonists are men, but the weight of the patriarchy is heavy upon the collection. In a later story, ‘Mack the Knife’, the main character, having left his wife, is now living with his much younger girlfriend. He is aware that ‘They had gotten everything they wanted’ but this doesn’t stop them being depressed, needing something external, something extra to give their lives validity and meaning. This might be drugs – his young girlfriend has ketamine – but it might also be a friendship with someone whose life is obviously worse than theirs. His friend with a son dying of cancer for example.

The female characters all seem to have an uneasy relationship with the power of their sexuality. Alice in ‘Los Angeles’ ends up selling her underwear to men, trying hard not to think about the vulnerable situations this behaviour might put her in.

Kayla in ‘The Nanny’ sleeps with the famous actor whose son she’s been hired to look after and feels as if this kind of thing were bound to happen to her, that she doesn’t have the brains for anything else and that growing old will make her bitter.

Thora from ‘a/a/1’ is a sex addict, obsessed with online chat rooms and in ‘Marion’ the young teenage protagonist is confused by the behaviour of her friend Marion who is so desperate to get a man’s attention she’s prepared to take naked photographs and get her friend to knock out her tooth.

Affairs, disloyalty, violence both sexual and non, simmer behind this collection. It’s a scary world that we’re presented with, one we don’t want to imagine is real, and yet, we all know is. Daddy is a political collection. It asks us to take a long hard look at ourselves and admit the malleable morality of the privileged. I thoroughly enjoyed the depth and intensity of these character-rich stories. Out earlier this month, you can also take a look at my review of her previously published novel, The Girls.

Feel free to comment, make readings suggestions, below.

Thank you to Vintage and NetGalley for the proof of this collection of short stories. I read it instantly.

After ‘The Girls’, I was so intrigued to see what Cline would conquer next and I assure you I was not disappointed.

‘Daddy’ is seeped in the dark chaos of reality. From sexual secrets to irrepressible familial disappointment, Cline has the talent and the moxy to talk about what often goes unsaid but never unnoticed. She has done something ironic and sinister and relatable, a new way of tackling short stories in our society.

Unmissable and perfect for any literary fan for Christmas

I enjoyed The Girls and was looking forward to this as I like short stories and wondered what Emma Cline's would be like.
It took me a while to get into the stories but I did and while they are all different they all have a feeling of the emptiness of some lives to them and we mostly don't know what is at the centre of the situation we happen upon in the story. For example, the first story, What Can You Do With A General. A father wants to break through the distance of one of his daughters as the family gathers for the holidays. He thinks about his past anger management issues. But was he violent? How far did his anger go? What did he do to his daughter to make her so alienated from him? We don't know. Something that is at the heart of the present is left for us to figure out, or not, for ourselves. As I said at first I was having problems getting into the stories and this was why. When I got used to how these stories played out, how the central issue was always slightly out of reach I finally started enjoying them.

Some are quite timely, with a real feel the the #MeToo movement about them. Again, we don't know what the men have or haven't done and all of the central characters are slightly lost in their own lives, or damaged, or unlikeable, or all of the above.

Ultimately, it is a good collection of short stories, thoughtful, intriguing and obviously well written. Definitely something I'd recommend to friends who are fans of the short story.

I really enjoyed this selection of short stories, even though it is isn't usually my preferred genre. A lot of the stories left a lot unsaid, which I enjoyed.

I think the theme wore a little thin over the course of the collection and the stories felt a little repetitive at times, but overall I really liked the stories here, and the unusual points of view were refreshing.

Cline's collection proves that she can adapt her writing style; condensing the narrative into artful 'chapters' in the lives of her characters. What do they share? Well, their vulnerability as humans in a world over which noone has control and all are at the mercy of others' faults and fripperies as well as lady luck herself.

These are no bedtime stories but explore the darker side of relationships in which power, dependence and frailty chip away at the ambition and resolve of Cline's characters.

My thanks to netgalley, the publisher and author for sharing an advance copy with me in return for my honest opinion.

I was really looking forward to Emma Cline's short story collection Daddy. I have recommended The Girls repeatedly to friends and family since reading it when it debuted. However, this collection lacked the excitement and pace which I enjoyed about it's predecessor. For me, the short story format is not suited to Cline's writing style.

Daddy is a unsettling collection of short stories, exploring the darker side of human nature.

Firstly, a disclaimer: I'm probably one of the few people who hasn't read The Girls (yet). So I started this book without any preconceptions about what to expect. It struck me that Cline's style is very well suited to the short story format: it's hazy and insightful in equal measures, and atmosphere is far more important than plot.

The stories largely focus on unpleasant characters and the seedier side of life, which means this is often an uncomfortable read. It's far from uplifting, but the stories featured in Daddy are astute and challenging - making it a collection well worth investing in.

How we delude ourselves

Ten short stories on the theme of self-perception and deception. Older, father-figure/Svengali-type characters tend towards the predatory and are the most deluded of all. They are secretly ridiculed by and repellent to the young women who do their bidding. These young women strive to fit in with their female peers, urging each other on in acts of increasing humiliation and savagery as they attempt to rewrite their reality.

This is all as you might expect from the author of ‘The Girls’, the novel inspired by the Manson Family. Cline even gets in a reference to Roman Polanski. Each story’s structure maintains an unwavering format, where you sense the real action is happening just below the surface – much as the protagonists catch the occasional glimpse of seething hatred harboured towards them. The stories end abruptly, leaving the conclusion, as much as the reader, hanging. In some cases, ‘Marion’ being the prime example, the close is gratuitously oblique.

Had I come across 'Menlo Park', 'The Nanny' or 'Marion' standing alone in a magazine, I would have been blown away. As it is, in a collection the identikit structure wore me down.

My thanks to NetGalley and Random House UK, Vintage.for the ARC.

I wasn't a big fan of this book. I went in with high expectations but the stories were a big let down. They all speak of something important that happened to the characters, except it always happened off the page and was only vaguely alluded to.