Book review: Winter Garden

[birdienl]

I've read and loved the books of Kristin Hannah for as long as I read adult novels and continue to seek each new one out. Each of her books deals with family; stories of mothers and children, sisters and brothers, husbands and wives; always realistic and touching. Winter Garden is no exception to this 'rule'.

Nina and Meredith are the two grown-up daughters of an American father and a Russian mother. When their father dies, their family runs the risk of falling apart. Nina and Meredith try to honour their father's last wish of getting their distant mother Anya to talk about her past. But what they will discover, will change them all.

In Winter Garden, Hannah once again drags us into a recognizable family story. Everybody who has a sister will recognize many of the struggles Nina and Meredith go through in trying to understand one another. And most likely everybody will recognize something in the relationship the sisters have with their mother; no matter how warm the relationship with your own parent, everybody knows that parents and children cannot always understand each other. Hannah describes all this with great skill and feeling. The language of Hannah's novels is always rich, warm and slightly poetic. In Winter Garden, it is just the same. The descriptions of the surroundings in which the characters live are vivid and easily transport you to their world.

Winter Garden is different in one way from the other Kristin Hannah books I've read. It has a historical component in the story Anya tells to her daughters about her youth in WWII Russia. Books combining storylines in both past and present have to face up to the challenge of keeping the right balance between both stories. A challenge Hannah shows she is equal to in this novel. Both the present story of the very different sisters trying to connect with their mother as well as Anya's story show enough depth and character development to keep you as a reader interested.

As I mentioned before, the novels of Kristin Hannah are realistic portrayals of family relationships and therefore no stranger to sadness and heartbreak. But Winter Garden must be among her novels with the most sorrowful tale. The, to me, unknown story of what the city of Leningrad had to endure in WWII is truly horrifying and it is very brave of Hannah to place a part of her novel in the midst of this. Winter Garden as a whole is a poigant, but not a depressing novel though. Because next to the sadness there is hope and healing.

Comments

[ever-maedhros.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a lovely and touching novel. :)

[rissi jc (from livejournal.com)]

sounds like an interesting novel. I like my fiction/movies/tv shows to have a strong character background and it sounds like this author doesn't skimp in that.