Customer Reviews

Hanna's Daughters

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

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.

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.

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 good novel.

"The years came and went, the children came and left. The worst of getting old is not tiredness and aches and pains, but that time rushes on, so quickly that in the end it doesn't seemto exist. It's Christmas and then it's Easter. It's a clear winter's day and then a hot summer's day. In between is a vacuum." The writing is beautiful, the characters unforgettable, a wonderful generational story. A bit confusing at first, trying to keep track of who's who, but worth the effort. No matter where in the world, this story shows the great opression of women throughout history and their roles as mothers, wives, daughters and granddaughters.

I loved the book! I gave it to my mother and grandmother to read and they enjoyed it just as much as I did. Being Swedish helped us relate to the book but I think women of all generations and nationalities can recognize themselves. It makes you realize that your mother and grandmother were your age once and that their thoughts weren't far from your own. READ IT!

Many of us think our mothers and grandmothers are eccentric but dismiss them without really understanding their behavior. It's the Tradition and Misconception stall. We expect our mothers and grandmothers to be different from us so we ignore their perspectives without learning from their experiences. Seeing all these stories together are a 2,000 Percent Solution. It forces us to see the common threads and the reasons why different women make different choices. I chose my AOL name after being inspired by this book to honor 3 generations of women named Giovanna. Read Hanna's Daughters and then find out your own family story. You'll be glad you did.

....about mother-daughter and family relationships passed down thru time. Hanna's/Johanna and Anna's story could be yours and mine, with a different setting. I loved the characters, each one unique in their own way. And I loved the remembrance of who we are and what we pass down through the generations, on the one hand wanting for our daughters, and on the other hand giving them their limitations. I loved the book so much, I am asking my mother to create in writing her family story, I shall do the same for my daughter, and hopefully one day my daughter will piece it all together!

OK, no doubt the book is good - I give it that. BUT- I'm glad I did not read the reader's guide located at the end of the novel prior to the book itself because I would have shut the book for good only because I found Fredricksson's opinions so offensive to me personally. (Check out the answer to question number two in the reader's guide) (Hey, Marianne- some women actually choose to stay home with their babies because the WANT to- because they actaully think it might be in the best interest of their children, and we aren't even poor, oppressed farmer's wives either- imagine that...) As a daughter of a Swede, I find many of my Swedish kinswomen to be quite forgetful of the traditions of family and, sadly, one finds many a broken home in the land of the midnight sun. This novel exemplifies what the socialist movement in Sweden has accomplshed while at the same time what is has sacrificed in terms of the institution of family.

Actually, this is an excellent read. However, I disagree with some of the reviewers here who state they became lost the further back in time the story goes. Because I'm partial to historical fiction, I found the story of Hanna much more interesting than that of Anna's. The beginning of the novel pulled me in but by the final chapters I was losing interest because Anna was quite dull compared to both her mother and grandmother. The most compelling parts of the book revealed to me how different women marry today in contrast to the rather practical, emotionally devoid marriages of necessity from a hundred years ago. Interesting stuff.......read it if you get a chance.

Hanna, Anna and Johanna is the tittle of Hanna's Daughters in its native Swedish, and I wonder why the tittle was changed in the English translation, the original is much more what the book is all about. This book is one of the most moving and wonderful books I have ever read. The story takes me back to my native Finland, Sweden's neighbour, and to the lives of many great grandmothers, grandmothers and mothers that I have known there. Some of them, just like Hanna, had to endure similar hardships in their lives, especially women in the 19th Century if they had a child out of wedlock. It was very shameful. It was considered a sin, and only the woman was blamed. Children out of wedlock were treated as outcasts. People's lives in old Scandinavia used to be heavily ruled by very condemning old religious values that almost all people practiced. It took strong feminists like Anna, and hard workers like Johanna, to change the old ways and beliefs. I also found this book quite entertaining. Marianne Fredrikson wrote this book very compasionately and humorously.

I really enjoyed how the daughter wanted to sift back through her mother's and grandmother's lives to understand them and why they did the things they did. I felt that the photographer's scene was explanatory because the watershed moments of everyone's lives were in the book - these details illuminated their lives and showed us who they were. It was most enjoyable. I hope every mother, daughter and grandmother will take the time to read this book to help us understand one another better.