Name: איך לאהוב את בתך (how to love your daughter)
Rating: 3.666666666666667 (3 reviews)

Hilah Blum

איך לאהוב את בתך (how to love your daughter)

Hila Blum

The seemingly inexplicable estrangement between a woman and her grown daughter opens up a troubling question: What damage do we do in the blindness of love? Thousands of miles from home, a woman stands on a dark street, peeking through well-lit windows at two little girls. They are the grandchildren she’s never met, daughters of the daughter she has not seen in years. At the center of this mesmerizing story is the woman’s quest to understand how a relationship that began in bliss—a mother besotted with her only child—arrived at a point of such unfathomable distance. Weaving back and forth in time, she unravels memories and long-buried feelings, retracing the infinite acts of parental care, each so mundane and apparently benign, that in ensemble may have undermined what she most treasured. With exquisite psychological precision, Blum traces the seemingly insignificant missteps and deceptions of family life, where it’s possible to cross the line between protectiveness and possession without even seeing it—and uncertain whether, or how, we can find our way back.

A Novel

How to Love Your Daughter

hard to love a book where, upon reaching the end I say, “that’s it?” 

Grace M

what i liked most about this book is that the reader also has to psychoanalyze what went so horribly wrong between mother and daughter. throughout the entire story, yoella searches desperately for an explanation in how loving her daughter ultimately drove her away. in recalling leah’s childhood and the ways in which yoella loved leah so intensely, the reader has to look at how even the daily, mundane aspects of their mother/daughter relationship served as a stepping point to leah’s departure from her mother. i liked that the book ended without an answer or closure on what exactly went wrong with their relationship because i don’t believe there is one true answer. yoella loved leah so intensely and deeply that she completely lose herself in leah and i believe that was their downfall. i believe leah loved yoella just as deeply (at least in childhood, because as a.child is there any other way to love?) but as she began to age, i think she began to recognize and resent the pedestal yoella put her on. yoella made leah her own personal madonna, believing her to be so perfect that she didn’t allow for leah to learn and grow as a person. yoella so deeply craved for leah to remain the perfect, innocent child she once was, so when leah began to become the woman she was yet to be, leah recognized that to save not only herself but also her mother, she had to walk away. if she didn’t, i think yoella would have smothered her so much that neither would be able to recognize where mother ended and daughter began. i think there’s such a thing as loving someone too much and i believe yoella was guilty of this. so much so that when she loses leah because of her love, she’s never able to find herself again because she put all of her love and herself into leah, causing her to try to get her daughter back, the daughter she idolized so much (not the daughter/person leah actually was), by any means possible, even if that meant causing leah pain. 

Jenna Thornton

“i didn’t understand it at the time, didn’t understand until much later that i’d had to learn how to love the children of others, while my love for leah was the opposite of learning, it was the forgetting of everything”

what i liked most about this book is that the reader also has to psychoanalyze what went so horribly wrong between mother and daughter. throughout the entire story, yoella searches desperately for an explanation in how loving her daughter ultimately drove her away. in recalling leah’s childhood and the ways in which yoella loved leah so intensely, the reader has to look at how even the daily, mundane aspects of their mother/daughter relationship served as a stepping point to leah’s departure from her mother. i liked that the book ended without an answer or closure on what exactly went wrong with their relationship because i don’t believe there is one true answer. yoella loved leah so intensely and deeply that she completely lose herself in leah and i believe that was their downfall. i believe leah loved yoella just as deeply (at least in childhood, because as a.child is there any other way to love?) but as she began to age, i think she began to recognize and resent the pedestal yoella put her on. yoella made leah her own personal madonna, believing her to be so perfect that she didn’t allow for leah to learn and grow as a person. yoella so deeply craved for leah to remain the perfect, innocent child she once was, so when leah began to become the woman she was yet to be, leah recognized that to save not only herself but also her mother, she had to walk away. if she didn’t, i think yoella would have smothered her so much that neither would be able to recognize where mother ended and daughter began. i think there’s such a thing as loving someone too much and i believe yoella was guilty of this. so much so that when she loses leah because of her love, she’s never able to find herself again because she put all of her love and herself into leah, causing her to try to get her daughter back, the daughter she idolized so much (not the daughter/person leah actually was), by any means possible, even if that meant causing leah pain. 

איך לאהוב את בתך (how to love your daughter)

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