Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, 1979 to Present Day New York, New York & Donegal, Ireland

Leo Faraday is a scientific person. A botanist who prefers to work in "Shed Land" (as his daughters refer to the shed out back where Leo tinkers away inventing gadgets he hopes will bring him riches), he likes organization and precise accountings of the household activities his five daughters attend to. Since his wife Tessa died eight years ago, Leo keeps the girls occupied through several posted rosters tacked on the wall next to the fridge where the countless lists of chores are written, and the daughter responsible for completing each one checks off her job as it's finished. For Leo, life is perfect if the schedule is running smoothly. But today during breakfast, his youngest daughter, sixteen-year-old Clementine, throws a monkey wrench into the works when she announces that she's pregnant -- and planning to keep the baby.

As Leo watches his hopes and dreams for his youngest hit the dust, the only thing he can visualize is Clementine as an unwed mother, never finishing school or becoming a scientist, and irrevocably tied to a child, when she's barely more than a child herself. His distress mounts when the other girls gang up against him as he tries to persuade Clementine to put the baby up for adoption. The sisters announce that they will keep the schedules, they will give up their own lives temporarily, and they will care for the child until he or she reaches school age, thus enabling Clementine to continue in school. The eldest Faraday girl, twenty-three-year-old Juliet, works in a coffee shop downtown and is quite happy cooking for the family and organizing their household. Opinionated twenty-one-year-old Miranda is a pharmacy clerk, getting free makeup samples and flirting with the handsome salesmen who make the rounds through the small town. Eliza's next in line, and at nineteen, studies physical education at the university, while the nearly eighteen-year-old Sadie is still trying to decide where her career path will lead. And finally, when another Faraday girl is born to Clementine six months later, she is named Maggie. And the countdown to her fifth birthday begins.

With pages full of secrets and lies, THE FARADAY GIRLS is an entertaining saga of the struggle the sisters face raising Maggie in a household where her grandmother, Tessa Faraday, has left a haunting legacy of her life that Leo worships. It all begins when Clementine feels empty and at a loss after Maggie's birth. She doesn't remember much of her mother; Tessa died when she was only eight years old. And now Clementine longs for a mother, someone who will answer her questions about the mounting emotional feelings her sisters cannot identify with. Clementine does her best to cope and, finally, as the days turn into years, delegates most of the daily responsibility of Maggie's care to Sadie, who, unbeknownst to anyone, quits school to spend all of her days with Maggie, whom she now looks upon as her own.

At the precise moment when Maggie is almost six years old and about to enter school, Sadie makes an error in judgment that reverberates through the family, and Sadie runs away, disappearing from their lives. At this point, the story fast-forwards twenty-six years and we find a grown up Maggie living in New York. When Grandfather Leo appears on her doorstep one evening, asking for her help, Maggie is faced with a monumental decision that will affect all of the family, and her own future.

There are few secondary characters outside the Faraday family, but a couple of them do have important minor roles. Dora West and her son Gabriel run Rent-a-Grandchild, an organization Maggie decides to work for while dealing with her indecision about whether or not to return to work. She left her job after a horrendous accident and isn't really ready to enter the job market yet, but loneliness and lack of focus send her into Dora's capable hands, where she takes care of a feisty lady named Dolly Leeson, who provides many laughs. THE FARADAY GIRLS is a long novel at over 600 pages, and I feared the pages would drag, but was pleasantly surprised that the pages move quickly through a story that is compelling with a bit of suspense and humor. This is a fine book for those lazy days of the summer's end.

Diana Risso