Review: My Daughter's Boyfriend (My Daughter's Boyfriend #1) by Daniel Hurst
When Ellie tells me she has a new boyfriend, I am absolutely thrilled and can’t wait to meet him. She finally seems so happy and in love.
But there’s a catch. Ellie has never met him in person. In fact, he doesn’t even live in the same country. Our home is in England, but Daryl is in Los Angeles.
When handsome Daryl invites Ellie to stay with him at his luxury Los Angeles mansion for a few weeks, I insist on joining her. I need to find out more about the man who has my daughter so enamoured.
Daryl welcomes us into his whitewashed house, complete with a stunning swimming pool and sun-drenched patio. Then one morning, I discover a terrible secret in his basement that changes everything. He has been lying to us from the start.
I go to confront him, but Ellie and Daryl are nowhere to be found. I call Ellie’s phone but there’s no answer.
Has something happened to my precious girl? And will I be able to save her?
I honestly don’t get the hype surrounding this book. In fact, I was tempted to DNF it on several occasions for a number of different reasons.
To begin with, Ellie is supposed to be a twenty-four-year-old woman, yet she consistently sounds more like a fourteen-year-old. I have nothing against diary entries as a storytelling device, but when she’s writing things like, “He looks even hotter than in his photos! I hope he thinks I’m hot too,” it becomes difficult to take her seriously as an adult protagonist. At the same time, she constantly complains about making next to nothing at her waitressing job, even yelling at her mother when asked to contribute financially to the household she lives in for free, yet shows absolutely no ambition to better her situation. Honestly, I got the impression that much of her attraction to Daryl stemmed less from genuine connection and more from the fact that he lived in a massive house with a pool, and she seemed to assume he would eventually take care of her.
What frustrated me even more was Ellie’s decision making once things started to unravel. Even after serious red flags appear and genuine danger seems possible, she yells at her mother not to involve the police because it’s “none of their business.” I’m sorry, but if I genuinely believed my boyfriend might have killed someone, I would be the first person calling the authorities. Instead, she accuses her mother of being “happy” that her relationship had fallen apart, despite previously agreeing that they weren’t safe and needed to leave. The emotional logic just never lined up.
Unfortunately, her mother Dawn isn’t much better. She openly admits she’s “too scared” to bring up money again with Ellie, even while she’s struggling to pay bills and working herself to exhaustion because of their earlier argument. At the same time, Dawn refuses to accept that her daughter is an adult. She becomes angry when Ellie leaves the house without permission or doesn’t immediately respond to texts, even stating she hasn’t “given permission” for Ellie to visit Daryl, a trip he himself is paying for. Their dynamic felt exhausting rather than compelling, and instead of tension, it mostly left me frustrated.
Then there’s Daryl and his father, Harvey, who practically arrive wearing red flags as accessories, to the point where nothing that followed felt surprising. The phrase “if it seems too good to be true, it probably is” may be cliché, but clichés exist for a reason, and this story practically waves those warnings in front of the reader from the start.
There were also several strange plot moments that pulled me out of the story. At one point Ellie laughs at Daryl’s explanation that he and his ex “drifted apart,” thinking that isn’t a common reason for young couples to split up, which honestly didn't make sense to me due to the fact that that is one of the most common reasons people separate. Dawn, meanwhile, becomes instantly suspicious upon discovering the house has a basement simply because it wasn’t included in the tour. It’s a basement, not a secret underground bunker. Similarly, she later reflects that Harvey uses alcohol as a crutch after losing his wife, despite him openly admitting exactly that when they first met. Moments like these made the characters feel disconnected from their own experiences.
One of the most glaring issues, however, involved a continuity error with Facebook that completely broke immersion for me. Ellie searches Daryl’s account to see whether he’s friends with a missing woman named Aubree and confirms that he isn’t. Yet when she visits Aubree’s profile, Daryl appears listed as her friend. His explanation is that he simply doesn’t classify her as a friend on his account; except that isn’t how Facebook works. If one person removes another, the connection disappears from both profiles. If she had added him, but he hadn't added her back, he wouldn't have appeared on her profile. It was such an easily avoidable detail that its inclusion felt baffling.
As for the twists, I’ll admit I’m a fairly cynical reader who consumes a lot of books in this genre, so I figured out what was really going on with Aubree fairly early on, along with several later developments. There was one final twist thrown in near the end, but instead of feeling shocking, it mostly made me roll my eyes and question why it was necessary at all. Everything ultimately gets wrapped up neatly, but the journey there never felt convincing enough to earn that resolution.
Apparently there’s a second book in this series, but I’m not rushing to pick it up anytime soon. I may try another novel by this author someday, but at the moment it’s not anywhere near the top of my reading list.
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