Just finished this stinker and I have a headache from rolling my eyes. It is disappointingly formulaic and borrows heavily from "Sophie's Choice", an infinitely superior novel. The writing is pedestrian. The characters are cardboard cut outs and insufferable to boot. I hate novels in which all the characters have to be beautiful. We are told over and over and over about the mother's "astonishing eyes" and the eldest daughter's "curvy hips", big eyes and "Julia Robert's type mouth". The younger d...

I picked this book for two reasons, one- I recently read The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah, and after it being one of the best books I read lately, I was eager for more!The other reason I picked this book out of her many best sellers was the WWII subject (yea, no surprise here, if you know me a little bit).So, what went wrong FOR ME was, that it wasn't like the blurb suggested- a story about two sisters learning their mother's story about what happened to her in Leningrad during the blockage, it...

Meredith and Nina spent their whole lives without really knowing their mother Anya. Any attempts they tried to make to get close to her were rebuffed, so they gave up trying and began to believe that maybe their mother just didn't really care about them very much. When their father dies though he makes them promise to try to get to know their mother, and says that now that he will be gone their mother needs them. The story follows Meredith, Nina, and Anya as they get to know one another and grow...

One of the best books I've ever read. Period. ✭✭✭✭✭The five star rating that this book deserves - no, demands - makes me question all of my other books that I had given a five star rating. A five star rating should really be elusive, hard to achieve. But sometimes, when you are in the grip of a good book, you get a little fast and loose with your ratings. Well, I'm guilty of it from time to time. I am officially admitting that, "My Name is Crumb, and I'm a Five Star Rating Junkie." This book has...

I read Winter Garden in our Traveling Sisters reading good and made for a great discussion. It is a well-layered, intriguing and powerful family saga that explores the complicated relationships between a mother and her daughters and the two sisters. The story is told from the past through a fairy tale told by distant, cold and interesting Anya who is layered with mystery and the present as we see how the fairy tale begins to bond these women together. Kristin Hannah cleverly and skillfully weave...

Excellent heartfelt story about the troubled dynamics of the mother/daughter bond and the relationship between two sisters. Sisters Meredith and Nina couldn't be more different from one another, and have difficulty bridging the gap to find common ground. Their Russian-born mother, Anya, however, has always been cold and distant and the girls have felt unloved, affecting each of them in different ways. Their fragile bond is further threatened after the death of their father, who was the glue that...

Winter Garden, Kristin HannahMeredith and Nina Whitson are as different as sisters can be. One stayed at home to raise her children and manage the family apple orchard; the other followed a dream and traveled the world to become a famous photojournalist. But when their beloved father falls ill, Meredith and Nina find themselves together again, standing alongside their cold, disapproving mother, Anya, who even now, offers no comfort to her daughters. As children, the only connection between them

BLECH.My sister got my hopes up, oddly, when she said this was chick lit disguised as intellectual - but I couldn't even find the disguise!This book fell into the category of those home spin wonders of Eileen Gouge and other women who either watch too much of the wrong TV or read the wrong books or something. This had all the things I could hate about a book - writing like, - she worked hard to be the mother her mother wasn't. And she succeeded. She was best friends with her daughters. Or, bette...

If I could, I would give the first half of this book 1 star, from about the middle until the final chapter 5 stars, and the final chapter 3 stars - - - so I guess that, all in all, the 3 star rating is probably the most accurate. This is the second Kristin Hannah book I have read where I have actively DISLIKED the main characters throughout the first half of the book (the other was "True Colors"). Nina and Meredith are the daughters, Anya is the mother - - -and as someone said in an earlier revi...

5* This book starts off slow. It is a story of relationships--mother and two daughters, Meredith and Nina, and the two daughters who have a strained relationship. Their father, Evan has held the family together, making up for his wife not being able to show affection for her two daughters. But he has had a severe heart attack and is dying. In one last attempt to heal the emotional gulf between his wife and children, he asks his wife to tell them the fairy tale of the peasant girl and the prince....

I may be unfairly harsh on this book because it is not my preferred reading. This is a recycled story. A woman endures overwhelming trauma as a young adult and emotionally shuts down in order to survive. But, the pain carried in secret, crushes her relationship with daughters. It is only when the adult daughter can learn the mother’s story that empathy can grow and affection can flow between the generations. This is The Bone Setter’s Daughter with the substitution of Russia for China. Only, this...

This Review ✍️ Blog 📖 Twitter 🐦 Instagram 📷 Support me ☕ “And maybe that was how it was supposed to be…Joy and sadness were part of the package; the trick, perhaps,was to let yourself feel all of it, but to hold on to the joy just a little more tightly…” I experienced Hannah’s writing slightly more than a year ago when I read The Nightingale and I liked it very much! My friend Leslie then recommended this one as her favorite by the author and I did not think twice and got a copy of the...

Some themes are close to me notably stories that deal with mothers and daughters or families in general. That is a theme also dear to Kristin Hannah, from what I read of her books and especially in Winter Garden: "They would always be a family, but if she learned anything in the past few weeks it was that a family wasn't a static thing. There were always changes going on. Like with continents, sometimes the changes were invisible and underground, and sometimes they were explosive and deadly. T...