Tale of several generations of a Scandinavian family - evoked a variety of emotions.

The synopsis Goodreads has for this book isn't even remotely related to the book I just read, Hanna's Daughters by Marianne Fredriksson. This is the story of 3 generations of Swedish women: grandmother, mother, daughter. They've each had a different life yet each has had to deal with great loss. It is the story of how the events of one generation affect the next generation. It was a little hard to keep all the names and places straight. The time period is from the second half of the 1800's through the 1900's.

I liked the first section of the book about Hanna, but by about 2/3 through, I had totally lost interest in the characters and the story. It took me forever to pick the book up again to finish it.

2.5

very hard read, confusing, the only story i really liked were hanna and her husband john's life together, the rest were not as interesting

Hanna's Daughters is a family saga set in Sweden that spans three generations of women from the 1870s to the 1980s. Hanna's Daughters, translated into English from its original language, is a nice glimpse into life in Sweden. Relative to the rest of the world, Sweden's history seems mild. Yet, the Scandinavian country has seen its hardships. Chief among them would be famine in the 19th century, which was incorporated into Hanna's story (the first of the three generations). 

Stories of mothers and daughters are effective in narrating panoramic views of multiple eras. Another three-generational, mother-daughter format is the memoir Wild Swans by Jung Chang. It's set a country that subjected its people to intense brutality and immense suffering throughout the 20th century. Compared to the Chinese, the Swedish have had it easy.  

There were good parts, especially within Hanna's story, but overall I found Hanna's Daughters to be contrived to a point of annoyance.  

The Varmland sofa alone was enough to bind the three generations. Appearance, personality and relationship quirks do not always have to be matched to an older generational relative's.  In this aspect, Fredriksson did a lot of "telling," rather than "showing." A writer should trust readers to figure certain things out on their own. 

The writer intended to make Anna deep and contemplative. After all, she lived in an era that afforded people the time and education for prolonged introspection.  Yet, Anna's excusing her serial cheating husband as his underlying attempt to "find his way back to her," was pretentious at best.

Hanna's story was, by far, the best one. Joanna's was just a culmination of her mother Hanna's hard work, and favorable circumstances including extended family support. Then, Anna's story was nothing special; it brought to mind Frank McCourt's famous line from Angela's Ashes: "...the happy childhood is hardly worth your while."  Wild Swans on the other hand…each of the three generations endured unimaginable hardships.  

One-dimensional tangents; August's suicide for instance. That was one sentence in Hanna's story, and was not mentioned once in Johanna's or Anna's. Another one-sentence tangent was Ragnar's self determination that his mother (Hanna) never have knowledge of what went on between him and Aunt Astrida in the attic.  


Nevertheless, I would still recommend Hanna's Daughters to anybody set to travel to Norway and Sweden.  The novel does garner appreciation of the beautiful Scandinavian countries. 

Dithered between 3 and 4 stars...Really enjoyed this unusual read - the scope being rural poverty in later nineteenth century Sweden through to the third generation's story from modern day Stockholm. It's a rich tale both in terms of its historical content and insight into the different generations of women, their expectations of life (and their husbands and children)whilst dealing with many of the same issues. Each story told by its own different narrator which I found slightly flawed only because the "voice" sounded exactly the same

The story of three generations of women in Sweden, told from the third generation. An interesting look at the role of women in Sweden throughout the generations and Swedish/Norwegein history.