March 2020 Theme: Mothers and Daughters

____

The mother/daughter relationship can be very complex, difficult and rewarding. No one can get under your skin or push your buttons quite like your mother or your daughter. It is one of the most important relationships that we have in our life and certainly worth exploring in book form. Historically many famous women have been influenced by their mother or their daughters. My challenge for the month of March is to read an historical book that highlights a mother/daughter relationship.

There are many books that feature this mother/daughter combination and I have made a small list to get you started:

* The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan – actually most of Amy Tan’s books highlight the mother/daughter relationship
* Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
* Winter Garden by Kristin Hannah
* Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
* A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
* The Other Daughter by Lauren Willig
* The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani
* A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
* Beloved by Toni Morrison
* The Cotton Queen by Pamela Morsi

If you prefer non-fiction then there are biographies that feature the relationship between mothers and daughters such as:

* Women of the Raj by Margaret MacMillan
* The Last Princess by Mathew Dennison
* Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang
* Libertarians on the Prairie by Christine Woodside
* Mommy Dearest by Christina Crawford
* Wild Game by Adrienne Brodeur

Have fun with this theme and let us know what you are going to be reading. Also please list your book(s) on the wiki: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/Reading_Through_Time_Challenge

I am planning on reading Winter Garden by Kristin Hannah which features the WWII siege of Lenningrad.

Looking through my TBR, I have a few that have been waiting around for a while that might be a good fit.
My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
What We Keep by Elizabeth Berg
Traveling with Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor

Great theme! I have two Amy Tan's on my shelf, so I will choose one.

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang, one of my favorite books, is non fiction, fyi.

>5 cindydavid4: Whops! Thanks, I'll move it.

:) I have pushed that book onto many readers over the years.

A Short History of Women , not just about mothers and daughters, but the rise of the suffergete movement in England. Powerful book.

I plan to reread True Women a novel based on three generations of her female ancestors. The late-comers arrived in Texas I 1831. I loved this book the first time I read it in the 1990s.

>8 clue: I have read True Women and really liked it. Because Texas is my home state, it had places I have been. She also wrote Will's War; it has been so long since i read it but I think it was about her grandfather who was of German descent. The Hill Country of Texas has a lot of German descendents.

I'm having difficulties finding a book on my shelves that is both historic and about mothers and daughters. I'm hoping that The Hundred-Year House might fit the bill.

I’m going to read Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang. It has been on my reading list a long time so a perfect opportunity.

Oh I can't wait to hear how you like it. Its the first time btw that I actually learned what the Cultural Revolution was all about from her first person account. In college, it was extolled as some fine thing. Oh my god no.

I usually try for nonfiction for this group, but I'm not seeing one on my tbr that fits this theme, though I have some fiction.

So, I'll likely go for:
Victoria's Daughters / Jerrold M. Packard (though I'm not sure my library has it)
The Kitchen God's Wife / Amy Tan
The Invention of Wings / Sue Monk Kidd (this one's for sure, as it's for my f2f book club; hope it actually fits!)

>13 LibraryCin: Kitchen Gods Wife is spectacular, her first, and probably her best novel. imho of course

>14 cindydavid4: Good to know! Thank you!

I'm thinking of reading The Summer of the Great-Grandmother by Madeleine L'Engle, which will also fit the "seasons" them for RandomCAT.

>13 LibraryCin:, >14 cindydavid4: Agreed! I enjoyed it when I read it many years ago.

The Invention of Wings / Sue Monk Kidd
4 stars

Hetty is the daughter of a slave woman. When the “missus’” daughter, Sarah, turns 11, Hetty (at one year younger) is given to Sarah to be her own personal slave. Sarah doesn’t want a slave and tries immediately to free Hetty, but that just doesn’t work. The two grow up together, but eventually Sarah leaves for Philadelphia to get away from the culture and the oppressiveness of being a woman who is unable to do what she wants with her life (she always wanted to be a lawyer).

The story is told from both Hetty’s and Sarah’s points of view. What I didn’t know until the author’s note at the end (though close to the end, I started wondering) was that Sarah (and her younger sister, Angelina) were real people. They left South Carolina and became abolitionists who spoke publicly about ending slavery, and they were among the first feminists, also speaking out (and writing) for women’s rights. This was in the 1830s.

This was really good. I liked both women’s stories. I thought the author’s note at the end was very interesting.

This weeks NYT book review has Anne Enright answering questions for the By The Book colum. She has some interesting things to say about this topic

What writers are especially good on mother-daughter relationships?

A key book for me was “Envy and Gratitude,” by Melanie Klein — perhaps, because she was a woman writing in psychoanalysis, Klein captured something I found telling about the connection between a baby (let’s call her a daughter) and its mother (let’s call her Mama, or Mary, or Hilary). The most amazing iteration of these difficulties and mysteries is in “Beloved,” by Toni Morrison, but more recently I also like “My Name Is Lucy Barton,” by Elizabeth Strout, “Are You My Mother?,” by Alison Bechdel, and “Letters Home,” by Sylvia Plath (the edition I read was edited by her mother, Aurelia). Now that I am a mother as well as a daughter I turn to the poets, who are better able to manage these perils and paradoxes: Sinead Morrisey, Eavan Boland, Sharon Olds, Anne Carson.

For this month’s theme I just finished Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang, a powerful story I will never forget. It is the story of the author, her mother and grandmother, living through the twentieth century from the days of the warlords, the occupation of Japan and Russia, Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang, and the insanity of Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward and murderous Cultural Revolution. Although this book has been translated into Chinese, it is banned in China. How this family remained devoted to each other in spite of overwhelming circumstances is attributed largely to these three women. I could hardly put it down.

I'll have two books for this theme. I hadn't planned on using Kristin Hannah's book, The Great Alone but it fits perfectly. Cora and her relationships with her mother and daughter are central to the story.

I just completed Winter Garden by Kristin Hannah which tells the story of the difficult relationship between a mother and her two daughters. The mother was a survivor of the WW II Leningrad siege but unfortunately, the story just didn't ring true to me.

>20 clue: I read The Great Alone last year and >21 DeltaQueen50: I also have chosen Winter Garden for this month.

>22 JayneCM: Winter Garden gets plenty of good reviews so I hope you like it better than I did.

>22 JayneCM:
>23 DeltaQueen50:

I really wasn't a fan of Winter Garden,it was just average for me.

The Thorn Birds / Colleen McCullough
3 stars

This tells the story of three generations of a family based on a ranch in Australia. Fiona (Fi)’s daughter Meggie (short for Megan) falls in love with the local priest when she is only 10 or 11 years old. The priest, Rafe(?), seems to also fall for Meggie as she grows up. Meggie goes on to marry a neglectful husband, Luke, but she misses home too much and leaves him to return, but only after having two kids of her own, Justine and Dane.

I listened to the audio. It was fairly slow all the way through. It did pick up – at least enough so that I didn’t lose focus – particularly after Meggie got married, I thought. I wasn’t as interested in Rafe’s point of view. That was some of when I lost interest, during his parts. (Oh, look – see what happens when you listen to the audio... apparently his name was Ralph! And for a while, I couldn’t tell if it was Rafe or Wraith!) I’m not sure I really liked any of the characters. Looking at some of the other reviews, it seems there was romance? Hmm, really? I didn’t notice. Overall, I’m rating it ok. For a while, I thought about upping that to good, but I’m dropping it back to simply ok. I did like that the audio kept my attention (mostly, especially after Meggie and Luke got married). It was mildly entertaining.

Oh I read that in HS and absolutely loved it. But not sure I would now!

>25 LibraryCin: That is one of my top 5 favorite books of all times! I will do a re-read for Geo-cat during the Australia month.

>26 cindydavid4: >27 Tess_W: I know I'm in a minority - almost all the reviews on this one loved it!

I read The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan. This is the story of three women, mother, daughter, and "auntie." The story is primarily the story of the mother, Winnie, and her hell-on-earth-life before she immigrated to America following WWII. This is the story of pain and survival; juxtaposed upon the mother/daughter relationship. A great read! 416 pages 4 1/2 stars

>29 Tess_W: This was a possibility for me this month, but I don't think I'll get to it. Maybe next time!

nvm

>19 marell: Oh sooo glad you loved it. Oh the section about the GLF and Cultural Revolution totally opened my eye; when I took Chinese History in college, these were seen as good things. I had absolutely No Idea.

BTW a couple of Amy Tan novels might be companion reads you might try Kitchen Gods Wife and Joy luck club ; both have similar themes

>32 cindydavid4: Wow, must be a generational or a location/political thing. Chinese history for me in college was anti GLF and Cultural Revolution!

generational for sure, I was a freshman in 74.....

>34 cindydavid4: Not really then, I was freshman in 70.

huh, maybe it was just the professor and the text he used. Anyway, I know better now

>36 cindydavid4: I think it's probably due to political persuasion. I went to college in the midwest. You?

When the Communists first began coming into power they were very different from the corrupt Kuonmintang and the days of the warlords. In the very beginning, the Communists stabilized the economy, returned stolen property, put an end to the opium problem, and when corruption reared its ugly head it was squelched. But as we know, it went downhill from there. I’m wondering how much the West actually knew about what was really happening in China in the early 70s. What foreign visitors experienced then was tightly controlled.

I have read The Kitchen God’s Wife and The Joy Luck Club, both fantastic reads. But until I read Wild Swans I had no idea of the sheer scope of the thing. Another book of interest might be Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie. The movie was excellent also.

I searched through all of my book shelves looking for a book that featured mothers and daughters. I found one about a mother and son but nothing about mothers and daughters except for The Hundred-Year House. The blurb on the back talked about Zee, the daughter of Gracie who currently lived in the house and Gracie was the daughter of Violet who had also lived and taken her life in the house. So, the book had to be about mothers and daughters, right?

Not so much, it was about the house, which had once housed an artist colony, then was taken over by a feuding couple, and from there Gracie and her first, then second, husband. There was a bit of back and forth between Gracie and Zee so I’m counting it towards this challenge.

For March I read The Summer of the Great-Grandmother by Madeleine L'Engle. This is volume 2 in the "Crosswicks Journal" memoir series published in 1974. In this book, L'Engle recounts the summer of 1972 when L'Engle's mother comes to live with L'Engle and her family. Her mother has recently taken a steep decline into dementia, friends of the family are hired to help care for her. The book explores her mother and father's lives, L'Engle's childhood memories, and her complicated relationship with her mother. As the summer goes on, we also get glimpses of daily life at the big house in Connecticut, about L'Engle's own daughters and son, and their children. I found this very moving, and very much a critical self-examination of complex relationships, and well as forgiveness and love.

I am a bit late in finishing this, but I have finally read Little women. Very charming.

Elizabeth Strout's Amy and Isabelle (3½***). Strout's first book, and I guess I'm low-ranking it a bit unfairly just because of (in comparison with) Olive Kitteridge.