Winter Garden

    Family, love, and secrets are the major themes in this novel.  Two sisters strive for years to earn their seemingly cold mother's love.  The older claims to not care even while she spends her entire life trying to 'be good enough' to win her mother's approval and love.  The younger sister becomes an adventurer and searches for meaning through her job as a photographer, continually drawn to women and their suffering throughout the world.
     A fairy tale is at the center of the story.  On his deathbed the beloved father and husband, the glue that has held the family together, extracts a promise from his wife that she will tell her daughters the story in it's entirety, something she has never done.  The girls' grew up hearing the romantic story of the peasant girl and the prince but never realized that there was more to the story than 'happily ever after'.
     I enjoyed this book.  It made me think about how important it is for us to know the history of our family.  Not just the genealogy.  I think that even if we cannot understand the circumstances our parents and grandparents came from, even if their stories are beyond our ability to empathize with because it might be so far removed from what we know, it is still important because these stories help us understand ourselves.  Each of us is a product of our history.  What happened to the women and men in our family of the past affects us and our children and even our children's children.  How many of us have found out a tidbit of history and suddenly had an 'a-ha' moment of understanding of an event or events from out childhood or even a glimpse of ourselves?  How many of us decide to change family patterns without ever understanding why these patterns exist?  I believe hearing the stories of our past is the first step to understanding.
     So much of our history is lost because either the younger generation never cared enough to ask or to listen to the stories or comments that are made by previous generations.  Or the stories are never told because they are too painful or we don't think our children care or could understand our story.  Then one day everyone who knows those pieces of your family story are gone, and the history is gone with them.