Review of The Catch by Yrsa Daley-Ward

*The Catch* by Yrsa Daley-Ward (2025). Published by Liveright.

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

For three years I worked professionally as a film critic, and while going to all of the film festivals and interviewing directors and actors was cool for a while, but I wanted to reclaim my time and watch movies I wanted to watch. Sometimes watching all of the new releases is great, and behind ahead of the curve, but I feel like I was falling so behind on movies I was genuinely excited about.

So I quit and decided to focus on this blog, and fell back more into literary criticism. I also randomly fell into a period of unemployment because of unexpected circumstances, and I took a long and hard look at my finances and realized I had enough to take time off. I did end up doing that, traveled for a bit, applied to jobs, and found myself working on the blog now more than ever.

Something that I’ve been trying to work my way through is my advance copy collection lately. As a blogger and content creator, I often get sent advance copies both digitally and physically. I tend to get auto approved for a lot of advance copies on NetGalley, which I sometimes take, but other times I’m tempted and feel like I need to get ahold of the book because it’s perfect for me.

That creates an even bigger backlog, but because my days are filled with applying to jobs and working on my side hustles and this blog, I have been trying to squeeze in more reading time than usual. I feel like my reading goals are usually larger because of this compared to the average person who has no time working a typical 9-5 and has a long commute.

Regardless of all of this, one of the advance copies I received a while back was The Catch by Yrsa Daley-Ward. I had heard of this author because of their work within poetry, although Instagram poetry is nowhere near my cup of tea. As a published poet myself, I gravitate towards literary / “serious” (who really gets to call what serious, hence the quotations) poetry, and I just don’t vibe with Instagram poetry as an art form.

Let’s get into the review of this book! I don’t want to ramble too much in the introduction, as I know these can get quite long and they’re not what you’re here for.

The story of two twin sisters, their dead mother who mysteriously reappears, and a past that creeps up on them.

We begin this story with one of the twin sisters: Clara. She’s become an author who’s shot to fame with her newest novel, although one could describe her behavior at press appearances and signings as erratic. While it might stress out her agency and PR person, she doesn’t seem to care by playing by the rules or trying to perform for an audience that wants to expect something particular from her.

Which it feels important to note that Clara and her twin, Dempsey, are both Black women living in England and navigating the world through these experiences. I find this important to note for both of them, but especially Clara, because being a Black author, especially a woman, is a different experience than being white.

There’s a lot of pandering in the literary industry and in book publishing, and when you’re not the standard norm of whiteness they want something specific from you. But back to the story: when Clara is at a department store one day, she spots a woman steal an expensive watch.

Clara is tackled by security because they got the wrong Black woman, but as she heads out and into the street, she sees the woman and has a startling revelation: it’s her mother sitting on the bus in front of her. This sparks the avalanche that propels the rest of the novel.

The narrative does switch to her twin sister Dempsey. Clara and Dempsey were separated when they were young girls after the death of their parents. Clara was adopted by a woman who kind of denied her new daughter’s blackness, while her adopted father was a Greek guy. They were wealthy, while Dempsey, who was seen as special needs and not someone they also wanted to adopt, was adopted by a Black man.

There’s an incident early on between Clara’s adopted mother and Dempsey’s adopted father involving trying to erase her curls, which is a fracture between the sisters. Now Dempsey watches as her famous sister is successful professionally, but is actually kind of a hot mess express when it comes to her personal life.

But when Clara calls saying their mother is alive, Dempsey does not want to believe her sister. She refuses to acknowledge that this might be the reality of the situation, but then the two sisters are set up to fight and clash over this. The rest of the novel is about them learning to overcome what’s happened to them and the current situation, although with some twists.

Overall Thoughts

This novel might be a hit or miss. I found it compelling in the sense where both of its main characters are flawed women that have to learn to overcome what happened to them together. They are unable to do it alone, and because of that they come out stronger in some ways, even if they might not love each other in the end.

But for others, they might find the writing style frustrating. I can see some chalking this up to being a poets’ novel, but I disagree with that. The language and structure of the novel itself feels a bit messy, almost dreamlike. In some ways, it reflects the lives of the characters it depicts because of that, but it made it more difficult to read at times.

You start doubting what you read, but this is a tale concocted by unreliable narrators. That becomes pretty obvious early on, so it also helps to approach this away from the classic way of realism and see it as something that evolves with the characters. That’s what helped me get through it.

Anyways, if you’re interested in the novel I say go for it. Get a copy at your local indie bookstore or at the library. I don’t know if I’ll be returning to it, as I didn’t love it, but I didn’t dislike it either. I can see someone really loving this book out there though, as taste is incredibly subjective.

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