Hanna's Daughters

Sweeping through one hundred years of Scandinavian history, this luminous story follows three generations of Swedish women--a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter--whose lives are linked through a century of great love and great loss. Resonating with truth and revelation, this moving novel deftly explores the often difficult but enduring ties between mothers and daughters, the sacrifices, compromises, and rewards in the relationships between men and women, and the patterns of emotion that repeat themselves through generations. If you have ever wanted to connect with the past, or rediscover family, Hanna's Daughters will strike a chord in your heart. . . .

Customer Reviews:

Women's saga

By Sharon Knutson "chinamomma" - May 21, 2001

Hanna's Daughters is a tale spanning three generation's of a Swedish family. It is told by Anna, who in a last ditch effort to understand her mother, gathers letter, diaries, and journals to read about her mother and grandmother's life. The story is told through a series of flashbacks with can be disconcerting until you catch the rhythm of the story. The life of the three women revolves around mother-daughter relationships and the path our lives take as a result of the decisions we make. Each woman struggles with similar heartbreaks (although they don't always know what the other one is/has gone through) They struggle with marriage, children, death, and finding ones self worth in a sometimes harsh world.While I enjoyed the story (possibly due to my Swedish heritage!) I still felt the story plodded in some sections so I only gave it a three star rating.

A touching story about a woman's life without being kitsch

By A Customer - August 20, 1998

This book has been sitting on my bookshelf for quite a time - I never had time to read, but one nicht I grabbed it and could not stop reading. For a few days and nights I lived with Hanna, Anna, and Johanna - all three of them remarkable women in their times. It is very much a "women's book", I cannot picture men liking it that much, because they don't know (and they CAN'T) anything about the sometimes difficult relationships between mothers and daughters. This book even taught me a lesson: talk to each other as long as there is time, don't put it off. It's a wonderful book that makes you laugh and cry! withought being KITSCH.

Powerful story of three generations of Swedish women.

By A Customer - February 21, 1999

The author claims this is not autobiographical, yet her insights into the depth of her characters might suggest otherwise. Not only the events of their lives and their families, but their feelings and thoughts at each moment along the way. While some of my book group did not like the interlacing of Anna's story into that of her mother's and grandmother's, I found this both a great literary device for this story(ies) and a way of keeping me from losing the continuity of the three lives and how the past repeats itself. The translation from Swedish resulted in rather terse and unembellished prose, but I liked this also. Being of Scandinavian heritage and knowing the story of my grandmother's hard life in Denmark and Minnesota, I could relate to the level of detachment women used as a defense mechanism and their stoic and silent way of bearing all things. The richness of the characters and story have stayed with me long after reading the last page. This is my test of a... read more