The Daughter Ship

by Boo Trundle

This irreverent debut delivers a headlong human comedy of trauma and triumph, narrated by the concealed inner selves of a woman on the Katherine, a lost creative soul and suburban mother of two, who has struggled into her forties with the urge to self-harm.

"Tracks the scattered parts of one woman as she fractures and finds herself over the course of her lifetime. A wholly original and unforgettable debut." —Julia Phillips, best-selling author of Disappearing Earth

Katherine, an attentive mother to her teenagers, comfortably married to her strapping provider of a husband, longs to overcome her dark thoughts and intermittent fears of sexual intimacy.

This brisk, mesmerizing version of her life is told in alternating short chapters by Truitt, Star, and Smooshed Bug—her inner children, each with their particular strategy for coping with Katherine’s past at the hands of a hopeless mother and a terrifying, seductive father. Several of her female ancestors, Confederate widows and their daughters, who’ve imposed a legacy of racism and damage on her bloodline, also join the telling.

The assembled ghosts and contenders for Katherine’s ear are gathered in a rusting WWII submarine off the coast of Virginia Beach where the truth of her life is, quite literally, submerged. Will they surface with it? Will they protect her from it, or deliver it to her? 

This unforgettable chorus of charming selves, battling over Katherine’s wellbeing, is unified by their hope for her future, as they collaborate to shape a personal narrative like no other we’ve experienced in fiction.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction

288 pages, Hardcover

Published June 27, 2023

Reviews

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible. A book I didn’t know I needed.

The only thing I can compare the experience of reading this book to is making a watercolor painting. The more I tried to manipulate and understand the story, the more elusive it became to me. When I settled in and let it go to do its thing, it was beautiful! By the end everything was crystal clear and the journey of having gotten there was worth every moment.

[203Reads · Rating 1 out of 5]

I DNF this book. I know it was a novel about heavy, traumatic life events, and I respect that. However, the writing style was so train-of-thought that I just couldn’t follow it.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished "The Daughter Ship" a couple of weeks ago, but have been sitting on positing a review because, well, there was a lot to process here! I say this in the kindest of ways. Boo Trundle, how this is your first novel is just beyond me. 
    I am not one to give out trigger warnings, thats a whole other topic, but this book is about trauma. Dealt with in a way that I have never seen before. There were times I was laughing, there were times I had a hand clasped over my mouth. 
    We get to meet Katherine, a married mother of two, trying to overcome dark thoughts and intimacy issues. Sounds pretty run of the mill so far? But no, the story is told in short bursts from 3 different children. Katherine's inner voices with different personalities, each having different ways to cope and deal with Katherine's past trauma and abuse. We also get visits from Confederate female ancestors in ghost forms, addressing racism in her bloodlines. 
     I almost forgot to mention, this is all happening on a WWII submarine off the coast of Virginia Beach. 
     This is a novel of protection, the battle for well-being, uncovering our truths, processing our past, and ultimately the hope for a better future.
    I am absolutely looking forward to reading whatever Boo writes next.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Initially this was going to be strong DNF. There's a lot going on with this book, and had I not read the cover summary again I would have been lost and annoyed at all the voices, not getting that they were the inner children of Katherine. After that I let the book take me, to a very unique, exploratory place. I haven't read a book quite like this. I don't think I ever will again. A lot of it is tangential and nonsensical and there is dialogue that usually makes a person roll their eyes but in the psychological layers of intergenerational trauma and the symbolism of a submarine, it worked. It worked really well.

I love that the author made the cover design and used "cut-ups" from other works to add to the story. You can tell how talented she is and how big her other worlds must be. I was pleasantly surprised by this one and wish her all the best, congrats on a great debut!

[Cassie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A family is a haunting.

The Katherine is a rusting WWII submarine, sunken off the coast of Virginia Beach. On the sub, three individuals -- Star, Smooshed Bug, and Truitt -- are fighting (often against each other) to stay alive in rapidly worsening conditions.

Katherine is also a middle-aged married mother who has struggled with dark thoughts for most of her life, which now threaten to consume her. In order to come to terms with the truth about her past, and in order to save her own life, she'll have to finally listen to her inner selves -- Star, Smooshed Bug, and Truitt -- even if she doesn't want to hear what they're saying.

The concept for The Daughter Ship -- a novel narrated by one woman in her own voice, the voices of her inner selves, and her Confederate female ancestors -- intrigued me right away. The story unfolds on a nonlinear timeline as we learn about Katherine's life and, eventually, the trauma at her core. Honestly, it took me some time to find my footing with it, and I finally decided to just sit back and let the flow of the narrative wash over me, accepting that it wasn't all going to make sense right away but that eventually it would all come together. And it does all come together in the end -- and it's immensely rewarding and affecting.

In an inventive, wholly original, and compelling way, Boo Trundle explores the devastating effects of trauma and the intensely personal work of healing. The Daughter Ship offers an unflinching examination of a number of dark topics, but Trundle's pitch-black humor and wry wisdom are a balm to the reader's heartbreak. Her storytelling is daring, emotionally resonant, and intimate as she writes about a cast of characters, housed within one woman, whom I won't soon forget. Thank you to Pantheon and NetGalley for the complimentary reading opportunity.

[Barbara · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very unusual book about a woman whose life was way out of wack because she had been sexually molested by her father when she was a child. She dealt with her shame and guilt with drugs, alcohol, more sex, and creating interior selves that coped with the different types of pain she felt. When these selves took over, Katherine would disassociate and find herself with her other consciousnesses living in a dank, decrepit submarine on the ocean floor.

What made the book weird was when it started, I actually thought I was reading a book about a family living on a submarine. Only later did I figure out that all the characters and the submarine were in the woman’s head. It wasn't hard to figure out, and it was interesting to take a peak into the head of someone with multiple personalities; but I think the book's blurb writers should have made it clearer to prospective readers what they were getting into.

[Nancy M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most innovative novels I've read in years. If you don't read the book jacket ahead of time--an approach I recommend--you may puzzle at first over the role and identity of some of the book's main characters. But just hang in there! Figuring out these characters is a form of suspense, a 21st century mystery, and a good reason to read this book. Along the way, savor the writing, poetic and yet colloquial, with beautiful sentences. I liked how the narration looped back to core symbols, with the effect of each time intensifying emotion, reminding me of one of my favorite writers, Joan Didion.

[Morgan McKinley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one was a slow start for me, but as a therapist i LOVED the IFS representation in Katherines story. its an entirely new take on a fairly common overarching storyline. very creative.

[JoAnn Stevelos · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished The Daughter Ship and immediately wished I had written it—but the truth is, I couldn’t have. Not like Boo Trundle. Her sentences are splinters: sharp, glinting, lodged beneath the skin. This novel is both forensic and elliptical—a work of survival, of satire, of spiritual excavation. It’s about trauma and marriage and parenting, yes. But more precisely, it’s about how we carry unspoken histories. How we keep going, even when we’re underwater.

Truitt, Star, and Smooshed Bug. Three inner children. Three voices trying to steer the life of a grown woman, Katherine. I recognized them immediately. I, too, am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse—ten years of unrelenting harm at the hands of a Catholic priest who lived as my mother’s partner and assumed the role of my father. I’ve splintered, compartmentalized, dissociated, just to stay alive. My trauma is more chronologically linear, but no less fragmented. Different parts of me—Little Jo, Runaway Jo, and Young Adult Jo—hold separate pieces of the truth. Trundle captures that experience with precision and grace.

What she gets so right—and it’s a rare thing—is that these selves aren’t metaphors. They are real, they are chaotic, they are sometimes the only ones who know what to do. Trundle doesn’t sentimentalize or tidy them up. She gives them space to be as strange and relentless as trauma actually is.

Katherine’s memories of abuse arrive murky, like waterlogged film reels playing in a submarine submerged—fragments and flotsam drifting past, too distorted to grasp, too familiar to ignore. She doesn’t feel horror. Not at first. She feels confusion, shame, and a kind of aching familiarity. Is it true? Is it something she can joke about—make funny? It’s not the clarity of a crime remembered—it’s the ache of something submerged. The metaphor of the submarine—the vessel of her own submerged truth—is genius. So much of survival is about what we forget just enough to function.

But this is also where Trundle’s work gets even more profound. In portraying the complex relationship of father-daughter incest, she shows how deeply the child internalizes blame. When Katherine says, "I seduced him", I felt myself recoil—and contend. A child cannot seduce a loving, mature, ethical adult. Full stop. As Judith Herman writes in Father-Daughter Incest, “There is nothing subtle about the power relations between adults and children. Adults have more power than children. This is an immutable biological fact. Children are essentially a captive population, totally dependent on their parents or other adults for their basic needs. Thus they will do whatever they perceive to be necessary to preserve a relationship with their caretakers. If an adult insists upon a sexual relationship with a dependent child, the child will comply.”

And that’s exactly what Trundle makes visible. Katherine isn’t a passive victim—she’s a woman trying to reconcile what happened with the way it happened, the way she survived. And survival, as we know, is never clean.

But where The Daughter Ship really surprised me was in the second silence: the mother. Katherine’s mother is present in the background, yet nearly absent. She is the one who stays home. Drinks wine out of a measuring cup. Tries to control her intake—until the control slips. “Mom stayed home and measured out her wine in a measuring cup before pouring it into a glass. She always forgot, after two cups, to measure. Then she drank the whole box.” It’s such a small detail, but such a loud omission. Her mother is anesthetized—checked out. A kind of quiet complicity. We never know what she knows, but we feel the weight of her absence. Whether she’s drinking to unknow, or drinking because she doesn’t care, we don’t know. That ambiguity is itself the echo of too many real lives.

As someone who has grappled with the idea of the complicit mother, this silence was chillingly familiar. It takes years to process what it means when your mother knew, or should have known, and did nothing. When she let it happen. When she needed you to pretend, to maintain the appearance of a functional home. In my own work I’ve written: “She didn’t stop him. She let it happen. And that is the deepest injury. That is the thing that does not heal.” Trundle captures this, too—not with confrontation, but avoidance. Katherine pulls away from her mother as the memories surface, and that avoidance is its own reckoning. A daughter’s silence toward her mother is sometimes the only way she can survive what was never spoken.

And then there’s the marriage. Katherine and Phil. I don’t think I’ve ever read a more accurate depiction of what it’s like to love, or be loved by, someone with a trauma history. Phil is kind. Present. Then not. He’s learned to flatten his responses, to filter Katherine’s volatility through a sieve of disbelief. It’s not that he doesn’t care. It’s that caring too much would collapse the day. He doesn’t believe she’ll hurt herself. He believes in the children more. And when Katherine leaves him, it’s not dramatic—it’s devastating in its ordinariness. And yet—the Smooshed Bug in me still hopes. Still hopes Katherine can return to him in a healed form, and that Phil might still be there, waiting.

On page 197, there’s a passage that nearly took the breath out of me:

“He was my dad.. He made decisions about my life. He drove me around, fed me, paid for my school, gave me a car. And I seduced him. I was too pretty. I looked like him. I manipulated him. I loved him. I was too trusting. I'm a bad person. I liked it! He made me feel special. I was warm, soft, sweet, beautiful. I had brown eyes and long thin fingers. I am a cocksucker. Love will never find me.”

This is the voice of internalized shame. Of a child’s confusion rewritten by an adult mind trying, and failing, to reason through what never made sense. It reminded me of Junot Díaz’s essay, The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma, when he asks: Why did I keep going back? Why did I get an erection? Why didn’t I tell anyone? These are not failures. They are the mechanics of survival.

The Daughter Ship doesn’t resolve. It doesn’t promise. But it does something better—it trusts the reader. It trusts the inner children. That final moment, when Katherine asks, “But where am I going?” and they answer, “We’ll take care of that. Go!”—that’s hope. The kind of hope that whispers: Just keep going.

And then there’s the form. Trundle constructed this novel using cut-ups—sampling text from fairytales, internet chat rooms, operating manuals, war novels and other sources. Fragments stitched into something whole. Of course she did. That’s what survivors do. They gather the shards. They write their way toward coherence. They make a vessel out of what was broken.

This book floored me—not because it resolved anything, but because it didn’t try to. The metaphor made the story accessible, bearable. Survivors will see themselves in the fragments, in the girls, in Katherine’s hesitations. What Trundle offers is not wholeness, but movement. A step. A gesture toward integration. And maybe, if we’re lucky, toward freedom.

[Ivy Kaprow · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5- I found this to be an extremely unique book about someone with Dissociative Identity Disorder. It deals with lots of heavy stuff, the heaviest being parental molestation.
From the outside Katherine looks like your typical suburban soccer Mom. She has 2 kids, a nice house, and a caring husband. On the inside however, she has a multitude of children trying to steer her from situations that might cause her pain. Truitt and Star are teenagers and Smoosh Bug is 8 years old. They tend to relive Katherine’s life from when she was a young girl called Katchie to when she met Philip, her husband. Katherine is pulled by both the life she is currently living and the past that has formed who she is.
Boo Trundle did a phenomenal job capturing Dissociative Identity Disorder perfectly in words. Written in 6 chapters, each chapter contains a part told from a different character, either Katherine or one of her inner children. The way it is written seems choppy at first, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll see it works beautifully.
I find Dissociative Identity Disorder to be one of the most fascinating mental disorders because it goes to show how far the human brain will go to protect itself. I love that there is now a novel that not only brings DID to light, but that also allows the reader into the head of a patient.
The only thing this novel is missing is a note from Ms. Trundle telling her readers how she researched DID. I feel like that would have been the icing on the cake.

[Marcia LeBeau · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful ride of a novel. I have NEVER read anything remotely like it. Just when you think you get a handle on it, the story dives deeper and takes you somewhere unexpected. It completely took me out of my comfort zone in the best way possible. Three of the narrators are the protagonist’s inner children and are stuck in a submarine off the coast of Virginia Beach. Even their names are intriguing: Truitt, Star and Smooshed Bug. Then there is dead girl who is the protagonist’s Confederate ancestor who she must grapple with. There’s a lot of grappling going on here. With inner children, real children, parents, a husband, in-laws. But most strikingly, with trauma. It's the inner workings of a brain and how it relates to the world and its real and perceived trauma in a way that you’ve never seen nor touched nor tasted nor heard before. As a reader, it helped me think about my own trauma in a different way. And while it wasn’t always comfortable, it also gave me hope and comfort. Not easy to explain unless you read the book yourself. Ping. (Even the sound in the submarine has meaning.) All the senses are at play here and everything is a metaphor (but only if you want it to be). This debut is filled with unique, masterful writing and I can’t recommend The Daughter Ship enough.

[Beachbumgarner · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Everything we know about love is wrong."

This is an incredibly unique debut about childhood trauma and the inner children one woman has developed to help her carry the weight of the shame, confusion, and pain she lives with daily. It was confusing from the beginning as the reader is plopped down in the middle of things as the main character becomes aware (admits the possibility of) previous trauma and grapples with it before denying it altogether. This is the cycle that repeats and is the one solid thing the reader can grab onto while each time the cycle expands. There is ferocious humor and life affirming insight throughout. I loved her metaphors of her character's struggle and the Civil War, and I also loved the voices of previous generations and being able to see how the "Sins of the Fathers" were still being grappled with generations later.

If the writing hadn't been so good, I don't think she would have been able to pull it all together, but everything from word choice to pace to sentence rhythms to denote certain characters was considered. I can't say it was an enjoyable read, but I did very much admire it.

[Sean · Rating 4 out of 5]

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Wow this book was a tough read, but in a good way. The subject matter of this story is heavy, but handled with a brutal honesty that’s somehow comforting. Even healing at times.
An exploration of Childhood Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Generational Trauma, and the hidden brutality behind acceptance.

The advice I got before starting this book was, “Just let it be what it is.” And I’m glad I did. The multipoint narrative can feel like you’re being tossed around by an ocean, but by the end of it, there was no other way it could have been to pay off in the way it did. Which was beautifully. -I’ll say, I don’t think this book will be for everyone and maybe, read trigger warnings before going into it if you’re an “empathic” reader or can be effected by what you read.

The only reason this didn’t snag a 5th star is that I felt there were some devices at work that didn’t serve the overall theme for me, but I do feel like if I read it a second time I’d pick up on dozens of little things that come to play later.

Also, a big bravo to the audiobook cast- they brought so much life to these unique characters

[Genevra · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book found its way into my hands and sucked me in every time I opened it.
It is not linear, there is a cast of characters that inhabit past, present and facets of our heroine. It kind of reminded me of a Russian novel, the way there were so many strands to weave in
I let myself be swept up and trust that I would understand- and I did.
It is a coming of age story in a way, the mid life getting divorced version. There are many beautiful descriptions of feelings and interactions
She describes how her mother used bandaids to keep her nipples from showing in outfits but how as a child she thought her mother was injured
At the end of the novel the author lets us peek behind the curtain of her writing process, which mimics the veil between interior and exterior that the novel plays with.
I quite enjoyed the experience of this book

[Chris]

At about age 12 I grew infatuated with books about submarines: Up Periscope, Run Silent, Run Deep were two World War 2 stories I remember. Around the same time, I started reading a lot of Bruce Catton books about the US Civil War.
Boo Trundle’s debut has a lot of submarine, Civil War —and childhood— in it.
In a chaotic fantasy aboard a sunken U-boat, Trundle gives us characters, speaking in turns, to piece together the story. It can be wickedly funny, or abruptly disturbing, and sometimes both in the same instant. There are many “chapters” that end with so perfect a summation, or phrase, or comment, that I wondered if the author had perhaps started with that particular observation and then worked backwards, so that everything before would perfectly lead to it.
The Daughter Ship is bold, creative, and personal storytelling.

[Margaret Hutton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Boo Trundle’s The Daughter Ship is a stunning portrayal of the creative therapy required to heal from an intense and difficult childhood. Trauma begets trauma, and Trundle evokes this proposition in a spectacularly inventive way. She’s also very, very funny—wit is a lifeline for her and the reader—as well as generous, angry, forgiving, philosophical, vulnerable, and brutally honest. With its cast of interior selves, fighting for opposing rights to shield the main character’s, Katherine’s, consciousness from the historic reality and accept it, this story gives new meaning to—no, torpedoes—the term “family drama.” To read this is to understand how the “whole truth dawn[s]” on victims, gradually over time. I couldn’t put down this brilliant book.

[Astbauhan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is such a wonderful debut from a fantastic new writer on the literary scene. Unique in presentation, it is also incredibly readable and FUNNY with plenty of laugh out loud moments. Exploring the inherently slippery concept of memory and truth and what makes us who we are, the story is quite a journey through lightness and dark, with many relatable moments. It perfectly captures the essence of growing up on Southern shores in the shadow of that region's history of conflict, shame, and trauma. A clever, modern take on the Southern Gothic genre, this novel was my favorite book of the summer.

[Helen Sullivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! So good. I was chugging along, enjoying the twin tracks of the modern-day story of Katherine, a complicated woman working on her stuff, and what seemed to me to be a metaphorical twin-track of Truitt, Star and Smooshed Bug (the names alone, too good!) that seemed to be parts of Katherine. But wow- the end, it all comes together in a completely unexpected, incredible way that makes you want to go back to the beginning and re-read the whole thing because you realize how artfully, how carefully constructed this novel is. Like a painting that you suddenly realize is a collage. The Daughter Ship somehow manages to be literary and page-turning, familiar and yet totally new. Bravo.

[3 Things About This Book · Rating 3 out of 5]

Katherine had special type of trauma. She had bunch of children stuck inside her who dictated how she was supposed to feel and react to things coming her way. Anything that was unresolved showed up as a new character in her little u-boat that she believed that she should keep under the water at all times. Katherine was so lonely in her crowded u-boat.

While Katherine had some people who supported her and kept reminding her that she was not who she claimed to be and she could be better, she was still missing proper care. She needed to get treatment to bury those little demons in the u-boat for them to never resurface again.

This was part hilarious, part disturbing way to look at a woman struggling with mental health. Having the story told by all the personalities that came out in the book was a great way to describe that inner turmoil. It is definitely an unconventional debut.

[Shari · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was recommended to me by someone I really like and respect and they warned me it was lyrical and poetic, and that is true. I think it is very well written, and lines stood out to me and I would find myself lying awake thinking about them over and over so I guess it’s pretty profound, but I also couldn’t follow the story at all and I don’t think it even has a plot? I had no idea what was going on and who was who and kept having to go back trying to figure it out. It made me feel dumb. Maybe my rating here is unfair as a result, because I am sure if you are very intellectual, you won’t struggle like I did, but it wasn’t for me. DNF at about 47%.

[Coleman Bigelow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Both the creativity and the fearlessness of this book blew me away. Boo Trundle takes the reader undersea and underneath one woman's lifetime of trauma, as told by her inner children. The process of using cut-ups to bring this story to life generates a fascinating stream of metaphors, insights and wholly original prose.
The story of Katherine's life is both troubling and beautiful and the book is a one-of-a-kind work of art.

[Laura Scalzo · Rating 5 out of 5]

As ancient as Iphigenia at Aulis and contemporary as the most original thing I’ve read in a long time. While the protag struggles with survival and searching for a creative life in suburban New Jersey and her young selves and ancestors come forward to participate, the author seems to be accomplishing this very thing. A masterpiece, really. I read it in one sitting. Tender and funny and horrifying and smart AF.

[Kathleen Gray · Rating 4 out of 5]

One to admire if not to enjoy. Katherine is struggling with trauma and her various selves (the ones we all have) emerge to tell the stories of her past and present. It's all over the place and confusing but there are sparks of brilliance in the writing, It's definitely not for everyone but it's worth a try. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. For fans of literary fiction.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is weird, dark, creative, heartbreaking, anger-inducing, confusing, and somehow also funny and compelling. I almost didn’t think I could do it… it was just too bizarre and I had trouble following. But I’m glad I stuck it out. I need to digest and discuss, and maybe even read it again, but I’m pretty sure it was both totally effed up, and brilliant.

[Kathleen Dang · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bought this from a bookstore bus in NYC last summer! I had not one clue what was happening in those first 20 pages (thought there were literal people stuck in a sub, but a quick Google of the synopsis cleared things up. It was a very witty portrait of confronting trauma through your inner children: dark humor but humorous nonetheless.

[Ivanna Raine · Rating 1 out of 5]

A very haunting book. It’s really confusing the way it’s set up. I let myself go and just let the book take me where it wanted to. It ended up making sense but it was just too much for me and I didn’t want to finish it… but I did!

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I laughed, then I cried, then I laughed and cried. Couldn't put it down. A compelling story beautifully written.

[Tracy Guth Spangler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moving, original, and really pretty brilliantly structured.

[Ashley Barnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whip smart and wholly unique. I’ll probably read it again because it’s that cerebral.

[Michelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is just too strange for me. I understand that it’s a traumatic topic, but I just couldn’t follow a lot of it.