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.
Robert Up At Dawn 