Mothers and Daughters: From the Sunday Times bestselling author comes a captivating family drama

Product Information

Ellis’s relationship with his mother gives the reader insight into his character, as does Rick’s recollection of his own unhappy childhood with his parents. I can’t say I was surprised by any of the outcomes but although I usually demand a little more intrigue I was happy to sit back and indulge in a very readable and engaging story.

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby.In addition to the simple physiological and genetic bond that connects parents to their children, there is also a deeply rooted and often conflicting emotional bond that develops between mothers and daughters. The ambitious scope of the novel—narrated by three Chinese mothers and four American daughters—allows Tan to explore multiple stories, seamlessly moving from generation to generation, from China to America, from tradition to revolution. Indeed, with Ellis by her side, they seem content to garden, appreciate their surroundings, and help out with village life. In 2019, the narrator (we never learn her name) travels to London, where her rambles through the city awaken memories of a London vacation with her mother three years earlier. As Lucy Barton recovers from an operation, her mother, to whom she hasn’t spoken for many years, comes to see her.

Watson draws a vivid picture of the woman and the times and lets us ponder: was Mary a criminal – or was her society mad? Why did she waste all those years taking care of her mother, Tillman wonders repeatedly, apparently not realizing that she’s already answered the question. With the opportunity to sign up for Motherhood Better boot camp, she thinks she will become the perfect mom she’s always hoped to be.Martha is married to Tom and she is her father’s daughter; driven, determined and efficient with a master’s degree and a successful career. None of the sins that she attributes to her mother seem quite commensurate with the fury she expresses about her.

Two sets of mothers and daughters star in this captivating intergenerational tale brimming with secrets. Erica James does have an uncanny knack of making the places she describes feel real, and the house was almost as much a character in the story as the human ones. The narrator may or may not be McCracken’s stand-in; the author likes to bat at the line between fiction and fact like a cat attacking string. Her mother’s were “small and weird and dear,” and indeed, those are good words for the woman herself. Martha has other ideas and wants her mother to sell her home and move closer to the girls, this causes some major problems with the normal flow of family life with them.So this is grief, she thinks, the apprehension of what could have been: “I could feel my mother’s joy on the London Eye, her love of heights and good views. I awoke at 2:30 am with but one thing on my mind—Griselda,” she wrote in a diary that Tillman found after her mother died. Chew-Bose describes her “beautiful mother” growing out her gray, wearing a rotation of t-shirts when she’s cooking, doing things in time—”wonderfully exonerative time—peel[ing] two clementines and [making] a cup of tea before unpacking her groceries,” and being nourished by “replenishing ease. I look back at so many of the years that Indie and I struggled financially or with the fact that my position was temporary, and we’d have to move.

Mounds of junk come down from the top of a cabinet, Le Creuset pans from the late 1970s, enamelware received as a wedding present in 1959, all coated in “the dense gray matter that accumulates in an old house with cats in it, opaque and oddly damp. Cheryl Strayed’s memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Trail, begins with the death of her mother from cancer at the age of forty-six.Prematurity, for example, is devastating to the mother even if the baby is only born a few weeks early and I doubt very much she would be over it that quickly. With a deft lightness of touch -- and a dash of unexpected romance -- Kate Long takes us into the heart of this mixed-up but utterly recognisable family who fight for what they believe in, even if it puts the closest members on opposing sides. Like a garden of flowers unfolding, this book offers welcome complexity, depth, and nuance to the topic of mother-daughter connection. Overcoming her challenges, Astrid’s determination to learn to live motherless is an inspirational story – so inspiring, that Oprah Winfrey chose White Oleander as a book club pick and narrated the audio release.