The Daughter She Used To Be by Rosalind Noonan ~ Crazy Book Tour with review

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Kensington; Original edition (November 1, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0758241682
• ISBN-13: 978-0758241689

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Book Description from Amazon.com:

Publication Date: November 1, 2011

The daughter of a career cop, Bernadette Sullivan grew up with blue uniforms hanging in the laundry room and cops laughing around the dinner table. Her brothers joined New York's finest, her sister married a cop, and Bernie is an assistant District Attorney. Collaring criminals, putting them away - it's what they do. And though lately Bernie feels a growing desire for a family of her own, she's never questioned her choices. Then a shooter targets a local coffee shop, and tragedy strikes the Sullivan family. Anger follows grief - and Bernie realizes that her father's idea of retribution is very different from her own. All her life, she's inhabited a clear-cut world of right and wrong, of morality and corruption. As Bernie struggles to protect the people she loves, she must also decide what it means to see justice served. And in her darkest hour, she will find out just what it means to be her father's daughter.

My take on this book:

When I chose this book for review I really thought it would be about Bernie Sullivan, but really it was about so much more, it was about family, and how one random act can change an entire families life forever.

Bernadette Sullivan (Bernie) works as an assistant DA for Manhattan,and loves nothing more than to sit around the family table listening to the cop stories her dad and brothers share. Before choosing her career she even toyed with the idea of joining the NYPD just like her father and brothers, but knew she was to big of a wimp.so instead she choose to work in the DA's office where she could help put the bad guys away. While she is happy with her job, she has also started thinking about wanting a family of her own, and at the age of 27 feels her biological clock ticking, problem is things aren't going so well between her and her boyfriend Keesh. When a shooting shakes the Sullivan family to the core, Bernie will see a side of her father she has never witnessed, and she will also learn that sometimes justice isn't clear cut. 


I loved the family dynamics of this story. It was easy to be pulled right into the middle of this family, and the story wasn't really as much about Bernie but the whole family.I felt like the Sullivan family really believed in upholding the law, well except for the brother-in-law Tony Marino, he was like a rotten apple, and I thought that Grandma Mary who was ninety and suffering from dementia had the right idea when she made the comment she did about him. I also thought the secondary story about Sarah reaffirms that life can go on.  The author also had the uncanny ability to make me feel empathy for the "bad" guy. I actually wavered back and forth on that one, I really wanted justice served for what he did, but as I learned more about his background my heart broke just a little for him. 
If you enjoy family stories with tragedy, drama, but also redemption and healing occurs then you should really read this one. The discussion questions that are included would make this a great book club selection.
Highly recommended!


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About the author:

ROSALIND NOONAN grew up in suburban Maryland and enjoyed being part of a large family. "With my four siblings, Saturday mornings were a blast," she says. "There was festival seating on the living room floor as we devoured cartoons and passed the Sugar Pops." She caught the writing bug in second grade when she won first place in a poetry contest. "The prize was twenty dollars," she recalls. "That was big bucks for a second grader. I thought I was going to Disneyland." Wooed by the taste of fame and fortune, she kept writing.

After attending Wagner College in Staten Island, she remained in New York City where she worked as an editor for various book publishers. Noonan currently lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, a retired cop from the NYPD, and two children. Although she sometimes misses the rapid pulse of New York, she enjoys writing in the shade of towering two-hundred year old Douglas fir trees.