I have mixed feelings about Kristin Hannah. Sometimes, I like her stuff (The Great Alone), sometimes I can’t stand it (Comfort & Joy), and sometimes I’m in the middle (The Women). I think this one falls squarely in the middle, too.
Just before Christmas, Evan Whitson, the family patriarch, falls ill and dies. On his deathbed, he extracts a promise from his daughters – award-winning photographer and wanderer Nina and the stalwart, type-A Meredith – to really learn about their mother, the cold and distant Anya. Nina tries but before long, the call of war and a hunky Irishman prove to be too much, leaving Meredith behind to deal with the fallout of their father’s death, the running of the family business, and what appears to be her mother’s descent in to dementia. Not to mention, her marriage is falling apart in the quiet way that marriages just kind of fade after twenty plus years.
When the girls were little, Anya told them Russian fairy tales of black dragons and princes and winter gardens, but after the girls’ disastrous attempt at a play based on the tale, she stopped. After Evan’s death, she begins to tell the tale again. After fits and starts, a story begins to take shape. We learn that Anya was a part of the siege of Leningrad, which lasted more than two years and killed an estimated 1.5 million citizens, roughly half the population of Leningrad at the time.
This portion of the novel reminded me a lot of the descriptions of the Dust Bowl in Hannah’s The Four Winds, and got me thinking about how cruel the human race can be to itself. Her depictions of the starvation, the cold, burning their furniture for heat, waking with ice in their hair… I admit I found myself skimming some of these parts because it was almost too hard to look at.
The story flips back and forth, between present day with Anya reliving the siege (boiling wallpaper for food, dragging the sled around outside), and the past, with Anya sliding in and out of the past with ease. While Meredith is trying to uncover her mother’s secrets, she’s also desperately searching for the reason why her mother never seemed to love her, attempting to repair her marriage, mourn her father’s death, and also run the family business.
This is an older Hannah novel; I suppose true fans will have read it years ago. My mother in law said she loved it when I mentioned it to her, but for me, it was just all too sad. And the ending, which I think was supposed to make me feel uplifted and like there was some hope left in the world, just made me even more heartbroken. For Anya and the horrors she endured, for her lost love, for Evan and the fact that he loved her more than she could ever love him, and for Nina and Meredith, who were desperate for a mother to love them, and again for Anya, who was desperate to be able to love.
