My Darling Girl
by Jennifer McMahon
Alison agrees to take in the mother who abused her as a child after hearing she only has weeks left to live. What should be a final act of reluctant grace turns into something far stranger and more dangerous, as Jennifer McMahon threads family trauma, possession horror, and wintery dread into one unsettling package.
The review
What a haunting story.
My Darling Girl starts slowly, and for me that mattered. I did not fully feel invested until around page sixty. But once the story clicked, I was glad I stayed with it because the family tension underneath everything is so ugly and compelling.
McMahon taps directly into the horror of obligation here. Alison is not just taking in a dying parent. She is taking in the person who shaped so much of her pain, and that emotional history gives the book a lot of weight before the more supernatural elements even take over.
I liked that the possession thread is present without becoming overblown. The book keeps one foot in family trauma and one foot in something darker, which makes the atmosphere much more effective than if it had gone too loud too fast.
This is one of those reads where the ending does a lot of the heavy lifting. The payoff worked for me, especially because the book had already established such a poisonous mother-daughter dynamic. If you can tolerate a slow start for a strong, eerie finish, this is worth your time.
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