Reader's Place: August 2019
Daughter of a daughter of a queen, by Sarah Bird. 2018.
Missouri, 1864. Cathy Williams was born and lived a slave until the Union army comes and destroys the only world she's known. Separated from her family, she makes the impossible decision to fight in the army disguised as a man with the Buffalo Soldiers. Cathy must not only fight for her survival and freedom in the ultimate man's world, but never give up on her mission to find her family, and the man she loves.
Daughter of Moloka'I, by Alan Brennert. 2019.
This companion tale to Moloka'i tells the story of Ruth, the daughter that Rachel Kalama--quarantined for most of her life at the isolated leprosy settlement of Kalaupapa--was forced to give up at birth. The book follows young Ruth from her arrival at the Kapi'olani Home for Girls in Honolulu, to her adoption by a Japanese couple who raise her on a strawberry and grape farm in California, her marriage and unjust internment at Manzanar Relocation Camp during World War II--and then, after the war, to the life-altering day when she receives a letter from a woman who says she is Ruth's birth mother, Rachel.
The daughter's tale : a novel, by Armando Lucas Correa. 2019.
BERLIN, 1939. The dreams that Amanda Sternberg and her husband, Julius, had for their daughters are shattered when the Nazis descend on Berlin, burning down their beloved family bookshop and sending Julius to a concentration camp. Desperate to save her children, Amanda flees toward the south of France, where the widow of an old friend of her husband's has agreed to take her in. Along the way, a refugee ship headed for Cuba offers another chance at escape and there, at the dock, Amanda is forced to make an impossible choice that will haunt her for the rest of her life.
The red daughter : a novel by John Burnham Schwartz. 2019
In one of the most momentous events of the Cold War, Svetlana Allilyueva, the forty-one-year-old daughter of Josef Stalin, abruptly abandoned her life in Moscow in 1967, arriving in New York to throngs of reporters and a nation hungry to hear her story. By her side is Peter Horvath, a lawyer in his mid-thirties who is sent by the CIA to escort Svetlana to America. Rootless, lonely, and bewildered by her adopted country's radically different society, Svetlana takes refuge in Arizona with the widow of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, makes a hasty marriage, and has a child. Floundering, she reaches out to Peter, her first connection in America and, it seems, the only person she can genuinely count on.
Compiled by Ina Rimpau