Winter Garden by Kristen Hannah ~ Book Review

Meredith and Nina are as different as two sisters could be.  The older one, Meredith, is the super responsible sister, married with two young adult children, has stayed around home and is now running her father's apple orchard.  She goes by the rules and her life is very ordered.  Nina , the younger is the risk taker, the adventurer.  She has no home base and is very content in her life as an award winning photographer traveling around the world and inserting herself into world wars to get to the toll on the human element.  She holds her camera and ideals close and her relationship with her boyfriend at a distance.  The two sisters rarely see each other anymore and hold resentment against each other for various things from their childhood.  Their childhood was not easy, made difficult by a very cold and distant mother who's only touch of love came from telling them Russian fairy tales but even that was held at arms length.  It was tempered with a very loving and encouraging father who always tried to build a bridge between the sisters and mother right up to his death.  On his deathbed, the father encouraged Nina to get the Mom to finish the fairy tale for them and then they would understand.  Meredith didn't want anything to do with it as she resented the fairy tales with a fury, but Nina grabbed ahold of it and pursued her Mother for the details and the end.  It was a decision that would change all three women's lives in the quest to understand their mother and bring closure to their childhood.

I ended up loving this story.  The  first part of the book was a bit drawn out in building the main characters and foundation of the family dysfunction, they were definitely the kind of characters you want to give a good shaking up to.  Everyone except the father seemed to be utterly self absorbed, though I wanted to shake him up at times too.  There were some majorly repetitive use of several ideas in the beginning parts of the story that caused me to want to roll my eyes, just small things but that were repeated several times sometimes within a page or two, like the author was trying to make sure I got the idea.  But I stuck with it because I had heard it was so good.  And I'm so glad I did, it definitely didn't disappoint.  It ended being a time split novel,  telling the story of the "Great Purge" of 1930's Russia and then the "Seige of Lenningrad" in the WWII.  At that point I could not put the novel down.  It was utterly heartbreaking and you could tell the author researched the part of women during this time and the hardship and heartache that they experienced.  Once the story really got rolling between the two time lines the author wove it back and forth pretty seamlessly and the use of the fairy tale to move the story, I thought, was brilliant.  The ending was unexpected and the story really brought out a lot of emotion, I cried through several parts.  

I gave this a 9.5/10 

Read Your Shelves Challenge Prompt:  A book with with a "hom-ish" word in the title (Garden)