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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 839.7374
EAN num: 9780345433497
ISBN number: 0345433491
Label: Ballantine Books
Manufacturer: Ballantine Books
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 368
Printing Date: August 03, 1999
Publishing house: Ballantine Books
Release Date: August 03, 1999
Sale Popularity Level: 318385
Studio: Ballantine Books
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
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. . . .
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Rated by buyers 
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It was OK. The story was interesting, but a little hard to follow sometimes.
Rated by buyers -
The story of these three women is set during a time of transition-socially, geographically and intellectually for each generation. From Hanna', a poor rural woman with very little education, to Johanna, a progressive thinking urban socialist, to Anna, a suburban wife and mother and novelist each generation unfolds in a widening degree while remaining integral to the way they loved and viewed the world.
There were many moments in the book that helped me view my own relationship to my mother and grandmother in a new way. In the most profound way, I can better understand that, like me, my matriarchs and their behavior and ideas were molded by their mothers and events of their own eras-not as I'd previously considered just wrought in stone by fate.
It isn't that I hadn't considered that they were human and had their own stories-I just hadn't considered how much of them must be in their secrets and in their dreams. Things we don't see on the surface when we are part of a younger generation trying to stake our own claim.
Rated by buyers 
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The very first of Swedish author Fredriksson's novels to be published in the U.S., "Hanna's Daughters" is the story of three generations of women. Spanning a hundred years of history, it explores a period of great upheaval, when hardship and modernization affected ideas of marriage and parenting.
The novel opens in the present with a brief introduction of Johanna, daughter of Hanna, mother of Anna. Johanna, now confined to a nursing home, exists in a "white world" inside her head, her memory gone, save for fragmented night dreams. Her daughter, full of guilt and agitated questions, upsets her without intending to. "Mother, she thought, dear wonderful Mother, why can't you show pity and die?"
Anna's father, over 90 and grumpy, arouses a mixture of irritation and guilt during her dutiful visits. "He has only two sides, anger and sentimentality, she thought."
The novel then turns back in time, to focus on Hanna, easily the best section of the book. Fredriksson vividly creates the hard, unsentimental life of farmers on the remote Norwegian border in the mid and late 1800s. "Hanna's mother had two batches of children. The very first four died in the famine in the late 1860s."
Schooled in an expectation of injustice from man and God, raped at 12 and a mother at 13, Hanna develops a solid core of self-effacing, hardworking indomitability. When a comparatively prosperous miller comes to the region and asks to marry her, she can't believe her luck, though he's more than 20 years her senior. She thinks of her house, her respectability. "She gave not a thought to the man with whom she was to share her bed and life." Hugging her joy to herself, Hanna vows a laughing revenge on those who taunted her as a whore for being raped. "Then she was frightened and prayed earnestly to God to forgive her for such sinful thoughts."
Fredriksson draws the reader into the inner lives of Hanna and her grave, kindly husband John Broman. Each is unable to articulate or even demonstrate their emotions, investing their deepest feelings with a poignancy that's lacking in the discontent of the later generations.
Hanna's world is governed by practicalities of work and survival; raising crops, finding feed for the animals, keeping children healthy. Her serious, fatalistic view of life makes her much less fretful and angst-ridden than her daughter and especially her granddaughter.
Johanna, Hanna's only daughter and youngest, brightest child is only eight when her doting father dies, the mill is sold and her oldest brother moves Hanna and the other children to the city. Johanna, whose relationship with her mother has always been distant, soon finds much to despise in the old-before-her-time ignorant peasant so easily bewildered and impressed by urban technology.
Johanna comes of age in the depression and while her choice of a mate is draped in notions of "Mr. Right" and sexual love, at her core she is as practical as her mother, relieved to find a man with a secure job. Over time, she gains respect for her mother's strengths and sympathizes with what she views as weakness; age forges the timeless connections youth despises.
The pattern repeats with Anna, Johanna's only child. Although Hanna lived until Anna became an adult, the well-educated city girl was never interested in the old lady until her mother's illness sends her looking for continuity in the past. Although Anna marvels at the hardships her mother and grandmother endured and celebrates the bonds of motherhood and daughterhood that they share, her character is too minutely self-examined to arouse the compassion and admiration that Hanna does. Educated and politicized, these modern women seem bleached of their personalities.
Fredriksson is a fine, subtle writer, with a feel for elegant simplicity in expression and an ability to convey complicated nuances of history and character without belaboring the obvious cycles and universal truths. Nevertheless, for all its insight, the heart of this novel is Hanna's historical drama.
Rated by buyers 
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The front of my cover reads "an uplifting family saga", but I found nothing uplifting about it. This was one of the most depressing and dull books I've read in a while. Perhaps it has some redeeming value as "literature", but an enjoyable read it is not. Hanna, Johanna, and Anna are mothers and daughters who are, simply put, always sad. The idea of happiness is occasionally contemplated, but then decidedly dismissed. I read to the end just to see if anything was ever going to happen. Finally something did. They died.
Rated by buyers 
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This book is a bit difficult at very first to get into. The beginning is a bit jumpy and some of the characters share the same name making it at times confusing. With all that said, stick it out and you can't help but enjoy seeing the legacy a women can leave. Although it is rooted in Scandinavian history, its truths and experiences are transcendental. A thought provoking and enjoyable read for women.
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