Thicker Than Water (1991) by American writer, Kathryn Harrison, tells the story of Isabel who was abandoned by her parents and is raised in kinship care by her grandparents.

Wrote Scott Spencer in the New York Times 21 April 1991:

“Kathryn Harrison has taken the lament of the unloved child and turned it into a kind of psychosexual horror story, replete with incest and mutilation. Abandoned, living in a kind of emotional stupor, the narrator of "Thicker Than Water" was a burned-out case even as a child. She survived her parents' brief, unhappy marriage as if it had been a kind of bloody colonial war.”

The story will be familiar to anyone who has read Harrison’s memoir, The Kiss (1997). Isabel ends up having an incestuous relationship with her father when he eventually returns.