Three Daughters - Hardcover

Pogrebin, Letty Cottin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374276609 ISBN 13: 9780374276607

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002

Synopsis

An ebullient novel about family secrets and the triumph of sisterly love

Driven by a legacy of lies, the shame of their own imperfections, and impending chaos in each of their well-ordered married lives, the three Wasserman daughters struggle with themselves and one another to break their parents' silence and understand their past.

Shoshanna, control freak and world-class problem solver, stands on the brink of a Big Birthday in the shadow of the Evil Eye, trying to enjoy her happiness and to overcome her fears while also engineering a double reconciliation between her estranged sisters, and between Leah and their rabbi father. Leah, a brilliant English professor and unreconstructed leader of the left, eloquent and foul-mouthed, a crusading feminist and a passionately conflicted wife and mother, grapples with the meaning of abandonment and the unfamiliar demands of her own roiling needs. Rachel, who has papered over her losses with an athlete's discipline, a fact fetishist's sense of order, and a pragmatism bordering on self-sacrifice, watches her carefully constructed world fall apart and in the rubble discovers the woman she was meant to be.

Three Daughters is a rich and complex story of three lives, their loves, and the web of relationships that either hold these lives together or hopelessly entangle them.

About this title

Review

The first novel by Ms. magazine cofounder and nonfiction writer Letty Cottin Pogrebin (Deborah, Golda, and Me), Three Daughters is a story of estrangement and reconciliation. Fifty-year-old Shoshanna Safer leaves her beloved planner on the roof of her car and, retracing her steps, finds only a few pages fluttering across the Henry Hudson Parkway. "The curator of her commitments"--holder of gift lists, addresses, phone numbers, appointments, credit cards, and receipts--this planner was the lynchpin of her social and professional lives. Taking its loss as symbolic, Shoshanna turns her organizational fervor to a goal that needs no date book: the reuniting of her father Samuel, a rabbi, with his eldest daughter Leah, a radical feminist with a bristly demeanor, a Mensa-level intellect, and a fondness for the F word. Similarly, she wants to heal the breach between Leah and Rachel, the suburban sister, whose adolescent sportiness gave way to an unfashionable devotion to religion and homemaking. Pogrebin has a playful way with words, and even when she lingers too lovingly on her characters' quirks, burbling on for a few extra pages here and there, the reader isn't likely to complain. Three Daughters is an auspicious fictional debut and a great gift for sisters. --Regina Marler

About the Author

Letty Cottin Pogrebin is the co-founder of Ms. magazine, a nationally known lecturer, and author of eight books of nonfiction, most recently Deborah, Golda and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America and Getting Over Getting Older, a memoir. Three Daughters is her first novel. She lives with her husband in New York City.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0374276609
• ISBN 13: 9780374276607
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400