Thank you to Robert Koehler for this book review. Listen to a sample of the audiobook here.
In the opening pages of the novel, How To Love Your Daughter, an older woman is standing outside a home, spying on
the family inside, a couple with two young children. The woman, who is
the story’s narrator, is Yoella Linden. She has traveled from Israel to
Holland after tracking down her daughter Leah who had gone missing years
before. Rather than confronting her daughter then and there, Yoella
returns home. What follows is a story in which Yoella examines the
details of her relationship with Leah from birth through adolescence.
What she is searching for is the smoking gun that would explain the
estrangement between mother and daughter. Intermixed are accounts of life
following the death of her husband, and a number of return trips to Holland
during which she hopes to work up the nerve to confront Leah and mend the
broken tie between them.
In Yoella’s examination of her married life, while she did suffer
from a period of depression and had to deal with her husband’s infidelity a
time or two, what she recounts is a happy childhood for her daughter and a
close mother-daughter relationship. It is only in adolescence that a
specific incident stands out as a dark moment for Leah, and one that Yoella did
not instigate. How To Love Your Daughter, published in
2021, proves to be a mystery story where the detective is investigating her own
life for a crime that may or may not have been committed. As a deft tale
about the difficulties of motherhood today in a world littered with so many
“landmines” for children, this makes for a fascinating read from start to end.
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