I was looking forward to reading this collection of short stories but, sadly, I was rather disappointed.. I felt that some of the tales could have benefitted from being a bit longer as they seemed unfinished.

This was my first Emma Cline book, and sadly I wasn't a fan.

I could tell that she is a fantastic writer, but none of these short stories seemed finished somehow. They were like a slice of each story and I just wanted more which i didn't get.

I first came across Emma Cline in the winter's issue of the Paris Review and loved her short story "Nanny", so I was excited to read her collection Daddy [that includes that story too]. Daddy is a series of ten short stories that examine masculinity, male relationships, as well as male-female and parent-child relationships. The atmosphere is glum, the stories are dark, and the prevailing theme for me was alienation. "Nanny", "Marion" and "a/s/l" were the stories that stood out for me. There were a few stories where I felt like something was missing and the ending was abrupt and a bit unsatisfying, but overall it's a really nice collection of stories. I also like the fact that a female writer takes the challenge of writing from a male perspective. Men are normally free to write about women, but women are often criticised when they write about men, so unfortunately it does take courage to do this. ⁠Thanks for gifting me this copy, I enjoyed reading it.

[Also reviewed on my Instagram account].

Emma Cline is one great writer. Her style is flowing and flawless. Having read Girls, I loved it and got lost in it completely, I was very excited to read Daddy.

This is a collection of short stories, all of the stories portrayed some sort of unreturned love, a sad and dark atmosphere hovers silently above all of them. I do love short stories in general but I have to say that I was a little disappointed in this book.

First, it took me quite a long time to read it because at no point through this book was I hooked. But also there is no link or fluidity between those stories, I find it hard to understand what is going on at the start of each stories, and then nothing really happens. When I say that, I am someone who loves reading stories when nothing much happens but it’s all in the emotions and depth. I didn’t really feel much pleasure in reading those stories.

Saying that, she has a talent for writing and just for this I’m glad I have read it. Thank you Net Galley, the publisher and the author for letting me read an advance copy.

Emma Cline’s collection of short stories capture the mundane and uncomfortable moments of human experience that are often left unwritten.

I powered through half of the stories as if they were chapters, wanting some way to connect the disparate characters. There is no linear narrative connection, other than that they all in some way are coming to terms with the failure of themselves, or the discomfort or hurt they have caused in others.

It was interesting to see how many of these stories centre on men. Even the stories that appear to discuss female experience see women acting as accessories to male desire. Cline depicts a world in which her characters must develop strategies against their weaknesses in order to survive, be it emotional, apologetic or financial. Cline’s subjects are submissive to the greater expectation held by society that they must continue the ruse of normality despite their various hurts.

This might sound vague, but truly that’s what these stories are. Vague fragments of many lives that have undoubtedly played out in some corner of the each American state.

Cline works with language and tone in a special way to create an uncanny, somewhat Gothic feel to this work. There were moments where I felt I was reading an updated version of Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’, which is a testament to my limited experience of provocative short stories, and the tension they can build in just a few pages.

Many readers, myself included, find it hard to totally immerse themselves in short stories, as they can sometimes feel directionless. Yet, something was different this time with Emma Cline. She touches on some part of our emotional psyche that resonates, regardless of whether or not we have had the same experiences as her characters. It’s an emptiness, bodies and minds bereft of their former glory, as they try to navigate their current path. It’s disappointing and unexpected, and people make mistakes.

I’ve read a few disappointed reviews of this work, but I encourage the reader to put aside their preconditioned ideas of what the reading experience should be. Instead, embrace this disappointment, as I believe that is exactly what Cline has planned for us. Showmanship is undoubtedly present in the skill with which Cline writes, as to begin a story in medias res (in the middle of things) suggests a faith in both character and reader that immediately creates tension. But to be able to transfer the same bemusement and frustration from the situations of her characters onto the reader, to keep them hankering after an ideal in their life that no longer exists, what could be more disappointing than that?

A good, quick read for anyone looking to expand their reading experience of short stories, as well as those who want to mildly experience subversive mind control.

Thank you to NetGalley and Chatto & Windus/Vintage books for approving me to read Daddy by Emma Cline.
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𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐢𝐥𝐲 𝐚 𝐯𝐞𝐢𝐥 𝐝𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐞𝐭𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐡𝐢𝐦 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐠𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐩 𝐨𝐟 𝐩𝐞𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐰𝐡𝐨 𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐟𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐲. 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐟𝐮𝐳𝐳𝐞𝐝 𝐨𝐮𝐭, 𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐥𝐲, 𝐛𝐞𝐜𝐚𝐦𝐞 𝐯𝐚𝐠𝐮𝐞 𝐞𝐧𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐥𝐨𝐯𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐦
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The stories and characters depicted by Cline are truly excellent. It is rare for someone to capture people in such a way that their very nature is so exposed to the reader.
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𝐀 𝐪𝐮𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭, 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐦𝐚𝐲𝐛𝐞 𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐞 - 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐬𝐞 𝐟𝐞𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐡𝐢𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐡𝐢𝐦 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐤𝐞𝐞𝐩 𝐬𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐚𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 𝐰𝐡𝐨𝐬𝐞 𝐬𝐮𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐫𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐲 𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐧 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐨𝐰𝐧
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The depictions of individual characters was interesting. Although this was a collection of short stories, the characters were fully formed enough that you could envision the sphere of their lives outside of the captured snapshot.
Some of the characters I liked, and could empathise with, and some I loathed.
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𝐈𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐬𝐧'𝐭 𝐟𝐚𝐢𝐫... 𝐖𝐚𝐬 𝐬𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐨𝐧𝐞, 𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲, 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐚𝐩𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐢𝐳𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐡𝐢𝐦?
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I especially liked the parallels throughout the book, where some stories were shown from the perspective of parents/the older generation, and some were told from the perspective of their children. I found these polarising viewpoints very realistic.
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𝐒𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐫 𝐫𝐮𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐥𝐞𝐟𝐭 𝐡𝐢𝐦 𝐛𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐬... 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐤𝐢𝐝𝐬 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐥𝐚𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐞𝐝 𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐢𝐟 𝐡𝐞 𝐠𝐨𝐭 𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐫𝐲
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Overall I thoroughly enjoyed this book, though it did at times make me feel uncomfortable.
Even the title is fairly provocative, and the reflections at times a little too honest.
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𝐇𝐞'𝐝 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐫𝐲𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐟𝐢𝐱 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐬𝐞𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐡𝐢𝐦 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐬𝐨𝐥𝐯𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐦𝐬 - 𝐦𝐚𝐲𝐛𝐞 𝐬𝐡𝐞 𝐝𝐢𝐝𝐧'𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞 𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐢𝐞𝐫
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I would highly recommend Daddy by Emma Cline, and would certainly read more of Cline's work.

This collection of short stories didn't really entice me in. The first story I enjoyed and was expecting it to continue as I started what I thought was the next chapter, having forgotten that it was a short story. The other stories I felt left me wanting more. Emma Cline was able to explore human emotions and writes well, but the collection as a whole felt lacklustre. I wanted more development of some of the stories, others could have been omitted. . It didn't live up to the hype for me.

From the author of ‘The Girls’, Emma Cline, comes a collection of short stories. These are a varied group of short stories examining relationships and power struggles between men and women, parents and children and old friends. Despite them being short stories, each character Is fully formed and comes alive. I particularly enjoyed ‘Los Angeles’, the story of a wannabe actress working in a trendy clothing store and what she does to make extra money. I am not a huge fan of collections of short stories but I did enjoy these as they come from a very accomplished writer.

Having read Emma Cline's debut novel, The Girls, last year, I was thrilled to receive an ARC of her new short story collection. I am not always a fan of short story collections, and am trying to read more of them. This one did not disappoint.

The stories all detail the lives of a variety of complicated and flawed characters: a father unable to see the damage he has caused to his children, a young woman taking risks to obtain additional money, a woman vilified and in hiding after a scandal. So much of the specifics of these stories are left unsaid, waiting to be interpreted and yet as a reader you get to learn so much about this characters and the lives that they have lived. Not all of the characters are sympathetic, but that only makes them more realistic.

The collection is 9 stories in total, all dark, well thought-out and clearly written. The stories all feel thoroughly developed despite their length, and I feel this is a real skill from Emma Cline. My favourite stories in the collection are The Nanny and Marion, and this book has made me excited for any future work from this author.

This collection of short stories by Emma Cline was well written, but ultimately for me fell depressingly flat. Many of the stories featured unpleasant, violent or abusive men and many arrived in the life of the characters immediately after they had done something dreadful but ended before there was a resolution.

Each story was a well-drawn glimpse into the life of the characters, but they were so miserable and/or horrible that I didn’t really enjoy the experience of reading the book. Three stars for the writing, but I need to read something more hopeful now.

Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing a review copy in exchange for honest feedback.

While I cannot deny that the writing and prose are absolutely beautiful, there was just something about this short story collection that I couldn't connect with. None of the characters we encounter are likeable or interesting, and for most of them it feels like a slice of a bigger story. Maybe I just don't 'get' them, but for the most part I didn't really understand the point. Nothing happens, and there's a definite air of sadness and depression that seeps into the words. These aren't happy people. They're not even well developed sad people.

Unfortunately this really wasn't for me. I don't mind unlikable characters in stories, but I at least need a reason to dislike them. And some semblance of a plot would have been beneficial.

Emma Cline delivers another brilliant, timely book. The stories in this collection navigate the intricacies and boundaries of relationships deftly, and investigate the more uneasy corners of human nature with subtlety and wit. Cline's prose is beautiful; she is an expert narrator with an instinct for unearthing and exposing, through her characters, uncomfortable truths.

I read this in a day, and am left (much like after finishing her debut) immediately eager to read more.

There's no denying that Emma Cline is an incredibly gifted writer, and I loved 'The Girls'; unfortunately, for me, 'Daddy' didn't have quite the same impact.

While the prose is beautiful and rich in wonderfully observed detail, I was consistently dissatisfied with the stories themselves, which feel more like random chapters lifted from a series of different novels than complete fictions in themselves. They often start halfway through a moment or situation, and the reader is forced to assume a knowledge of characters and their lives that they neither have to begin with or become privy to later. In addition, the stories - without exception - end abruptly, leaving the reader to imagine their own ending. While I don't mind this as an occasional device, when it's employed in every story in a collection it leaves me feeling frustrated and dissatisfied.

I gave this a three because the writing itself is exceptional, more akin to poetry than prose at times. But sadly the stories themselves felt empty to me,

Thank you to NetGalley and to the publisher for granting me an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Emma Cline is a great writer of pacy, intelligent thrillers, and this is no exception. I think this will be a huge hit.

I was one of the few people who found Emma Cline’s The Girls to be overhyped (all style, no substance etc plus I found the sections where the protagonist was older to be almost unreadably dull) so naturally I was a bit wary of reading Daddy. However, I suspected that her writing style would be more suited to short stories and I found this to be true.

I was very pleasantly surprised by Daddy (!), a spiky collection which features toxic masculinity and disappointing dads as its overarching themes. My favourites were Los Angeles, The Nanny, Marion and a/s/l, all of which focus on female protagonists.

Interestingly, other reviews suggest that people who were obsessed with The Girls seem to be disappointed by these stories, whereas people (like me) who were underwhelmed by the novel ended up enjoying the collection. Basically, what I’m saying is, don’t give this one a miss even if you found The Girls to be overrated because several of these stories are singular gems!

Beautiful short stories - as often with collections, some are better than others - about families, relationships, keeping secrets. I loved their apparent simplicity, the characters - all flawed and somehow relatable - and the way they dealth with different situations of loss, things not going the way we wanted, impossible situations. I would read more by the same author.

I received a copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review - thanks so much to Netgalley for sending this to me!

After reading Emma Cline’s debut novel ‘The Girls,’ I was won over by her incredible writing style, her eye for tiny details that built such a vivid picture, and her amazing sense of atmosphere. I was excited to read her short story collection, since short fiction often places emphasis on these kinds of skills. Unfortunately, I found this collection to be lackluster and boring for the most part.

The stories in ‘Daddy’ focus largely on the mundane - bland, tired, often rich men contending with unpredictable mistresses, unremarkable sons and declining businesses. Most of them hinted at more interesting things to come, like you would turn the page to find the missing pieces all falling into place, but then nothing ever came of it, leaving me unsatisfied as it felt like the true point of the stories slipped out of my grasp. The characters were similarly unsatisfying for the most part - to my mind, a character doesn’t have to be likeable, but they should at least be interesting, and most of the men in this book were neither. I did find that the female characters in this book were all far more interesting and well-characterised than their male counterparts, though whether that was a coincidence or a conscious narrative choice I couldn’t say. The writing style - which in her previous book was breathtaking - was, for the most part, unremarkable, lacking the attention to detail and description that

I only actually enjoyed two stories in this collection: ‘Marion’ and ‘A/S/L,’ both of which possessed the dreamy, surreal and yet almost hyperrealistic quality I’ve come to expect from this author. One, a story of teenage friendship between two young girls experiencing the start of their sexual awakening, the other following a young woman in a treatment facility who’s turned to male attention to satisfy her need for excitement. These stories felt a lot more focused and purposeful - I just wish it hadn’t taken so long to get to them. I almost DNF’d, and I’m glad I didn’t, because ‘Marion’ in particular was an excellent story, but I was left feeling frustrated that the rest of the stories weren’t of a similar quality.

Overall, I ‘Daddy’ was a letdown for me. The two excellent stories near the end showed that Emma Cline is clearly a gifted and insightful author, but the subject matter and bland realness of the majority of these stories really wasn’t my cup of tea. I’ll still keep an eye on her and would definitely read more of her work in future, but I’d definitely do a bit more research into the subject of her next work before picking it up.

I’m not sure how to review this collection of stories, other than that I really enjoyed them.

There isn’t a clear theme running through them as much as I’ve found in other story collections. While many stories focus on family, as the title suggests, I wouldn’t say they all follow that theme.

There’s a lot of “unknowing” in this collection which is both intriguing and frustrating. Most often a story finishes before you’ve really understood what has happened, but I really loved this sense of unfinished business. Some of the stories I wish had been longer for this reason.

My favourites were the opening story, the story of the woman working in the clothing store in LA, the story of the woman who had an affair with a famous actor, the story of the man travelling to the boarding school to find out about an incident his son has been involved in and the final story of two women at a rehab centre.

I really enjoyed this collection and know I’ll be thinking about some of the stories for a long time after.

Wonderful. Loved her novel and this comes from very much a similar place. Brilliantly realized and believable characters.

I loved 'The Girls', Emma Cline's debut novel, and her first collection of short stories doesn't disappoint. Cline writes about the dark side of American life in these stories, many of which are set in Los Angeles or elsewhere in California.

There are similar themes to 'The Girls' in some of the stories - in 'Marion' and 'a/s'/' in particular, with the former focusing on some sort of commune and the latter a rehab centre, Cline has a real knack with being able to delve into the lives of people, whether young or old, male or female - and as a reader, you feel that she really knows, really understands, the people she is writing about. The opening tale, 'What Can You Do with a General', zooms in on the minutiae of family life, with picking up people from the airport, going shopping and the impact that modern life has on people - even if this isn't explicitly stated. Towards the end, one of the daughters, Sasha, denies her love of watching 'The Wizard of Oz' - her father's statement that she loved the film really irritates her, so much so that she claims it's Chloe, her sister's, favourite - something all parents might notice as children grow older, how they can be argumentative and disagreeable. In 'Northeast Regional', a father has to take the train to his son's boarding school to confront the reason he's been expelled - a reason we, as readers, never fully understand. Again, the dynamics in parent-child relationships are explored here. In the penultimate story, 'Mack the Knife', Cline hones in on the male - in this case, a group of friends who know each other well but have all moved on with their lives.

Some of the stories in this collection are not particularly memorable - but this does not make them bad stories. Cline deals with the intricacies of life, the disagreements and conflicts, people's foibles and habits, the way we sometimes deliberately upset others. This is life, isn't it - modern life, at least? Interestingly, the title of the collection isn't a title of one of the stories, perhaps for no good reason. And this, in many ways, sums up the collection. This happens, things don't happen. Sometimes we know why, sometimes we don't. Cline is commenting on how life is nowadays and it's this that I believe to be an enviable skills of hers - and one that you will learn about if you read this collection.