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How to Love Your Daughter
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 6 hrs and 18 mins
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How to Love Your Daughter
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Publisher's Summary
“A stone-cold masterwork of psychological tension. Its final pages had me holding my breath.” —Flynn Berry, New York Times Book Review
The seemingly inexplicable estrangement between a woman and her grown daughter opens up a troubling question: What damage do we do in the blindness of love?
Thousands of miles from home, a woman stands on a dark street, peeking through well-lit windows at two little girls. They are the grandchildren she’s never met, daughters of the daughter she has not seen in years.
At the center of this mesmerizing story is the woman’s quest to understand how a relationship that began in bliss—a mother besotted with her only child—arrived at a point of such unfathomable distance. Weaving back and forth in time, she unravels memories and long-buried feelings, retracing the infinite acts of parental care, each so mundane and apparently benign, that in ensemble may have undermined what she most treasured. With exquisite psychological precision, Blum traces the seemingly insignificant missteps and deceptions of family life, where it’s possible to cross the line between protectiveness and possession without even seeing it—and uncertain whether, or how, we can find our way back.
What the critics say
“A stone-cold masterwork of psychological tension. Often its sentences are deceptively clear, as transparent and menacing as a swarm of jellyfish. Elsewhere, the tone swerves into humor, even goofiness. What links the two disparate registers, and all those in between, is an unerring authenticity: Every observation, gesture and piece of dialogue rings true. . . . its intrigues and revelations are dramatic enough to be wholly satisfying. Its final pages had me holding my breath.” —Flynn Berry, New York Times Book Review
“A mother’s adoration of her only child might be commonplace, but it is never simple. Hila Blum explores one particular mother-daughter relationship with remarkable acuity. Her novel takes us on a suspenseful psychological journey as she plumbs a great mystery: how the purest maternal love can lead to the most unwanted and even disastrous consequences.”—Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend and What Are You Going Through
“A striking and memorable novel. With single-minded intensity, How to Love Your Daughter reckons with parent-child boundaries: the ones that are clear, and the ones that are sometimes hazy, or dangerously nonexistent.”—Meg Wolitzer