The Senator’s Daughter (to date, at Chapter 11) is a story about modern Sudan. As the story opens (we’ll ignore the prologue), Kasia Wajda is a pilot/smuggler who is in Khartoum to pick up some contraband and a passenger—Hannah Sinclair, an American surgeon who is on her way to spend a year at a refugee camp in Darfur. Kasia is a rough-and-tumble girl with a lot of tragedy in her past. Hannah is the daughter of a US Senator. We follow them as they get to know each other and have a few misadventures on their flight across Sudan to El Salaam, where Kasia appears to be living and where Hannah will be working.
The Senator’s Daughter is a difficult story for me to review. I wanted to like it, I really did. A while back, I read through the blog of an MSF doctor who spent a year at a clinic in Sudan (not Darfur, specifically), and I was looking forward to a fictional take on living in such situations. A little romance tossed in sounded like an interesting twist. I was hoping for some deep insight, and an understanding of the people involved in this situation.
So far, I don’t think I’ve got it. And while the writing gets (quite a bit) better starting in Chapter 5, the prologue and first four chapters are a huge problem for me as a reviewer, as I don’t think many readers will be able to put up with them long enough to get to the better stuff.
When the writing stays in scene, The Senator’s Daughter is readable and flows well. At times, it’s even good. Chapters 5, 6, 7, and 10, in particular, stand out as an example of what this story could be. I’ve even started to get a feeling for the characters as people, which was very much lacking from the first half of what’s been posted.
But in the opening chapters, the author doesn’t seem to trust us to figure stuff out for ourselves. At every tiny event, we are bombarded with all of the backstory we could ever want to know (and then some), which makes the narrative feel pushy and the characters flat. Internal reactions are constantly explained to us. And at times, these passages run into the hundreds of words—right in the middle of a scene. Too often, they are used in place of what could have been good dialogue and real observation. As a result, the story in these chapters never develops any real tension, or the characters any real depth, and I found myself skimming text and looking out the window far more often than I should have.
The story also clearly has an agenda, and while no one gets off entirely free of blame, there is a definite preachiness about it—against the typical cardboard villains of the various mentioned conflicts—that feels simplistic. These brushes with the larger political context are not well-integrated with the story—especially when they are told through wooden dialogue—and so feel like inept propaganda more than good prose.
As I said, things do improve around Chapter 5, but those habits seem to die hard—every once in a while, even in the better writing, the author still slips into long-winded backstory or preaching about all of the nasty people in the world. And, while the writing does improve, I’m not sure it has yet made me interested enough to forgive it its faults.
Fiction has enormous power to make people care, by turning dry ideas into living, breathing, sharply-defined stories of "real" people. Unfortuntately, in The Senator’s Daughter, that power is seldom used, and never for long. Too often, the author seems to want to tell us what we should think, instead of putting in the work of getting us involved in the story.
In the end, I expected so much more of this story than I got. It’s too bad, too, because there is some careful attention to detail in evidence here, and the author clearly has the capacity to write. If only she could have written less.
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