Finished: Winter Garden (Hannah) Another page-turning historical novel by the author of The Nightingale. Winter Garden is the story of two grown sisters, Meredith and Nina, who have been shunned by their cold mother all their lives. They've never felt any love from her, but their beloved father has held the family together and loved them all their lives. The only thing their mother has ever done that was at all mother-like was tell them the fairy tale of the Russian peasant girl who fell in love with the prince, and vice versa, in the magical white wonderland of Russia. When their father dies, first eliciting the promise that they will listen to their mother's entire fairy tale to the end, Meredith, whose marriage is on rocky ground, and Nina, the photojournalist who can barely stay in one place for long, are forced to spend time with their mother to try and get to know her before the three of them are shattered irrevocably. Unreceptive at first, their mother finally agrees to tell them the fairy tale at her own pace, a bit at a time every night. In the mean time, the trio finally starts to get knowing each other slowly over shared dinners. As the nightly fairy tale unfolds, it becomes clear that their mother, Vera, was actually the Russian peasant girl who fell in love and married her prince, Sasha, at the age of seventeen. She's lost her poet father through Stalin's Russian purges, and has only her mother, her grandmother and her sister left. After a few happy years of marriage, Vera and Sasha have five year old Anya and four year old Leo. The happiness is short lived, however, as they begin to live through that time in history when the Germans are invading Russia in WWII. Soon, Sasha must join the Red Army and go to fight the Germans. Vera, her children, and her family are left to fend for themselves in Leningrad. They go through horrific nightmares, bombings, starvation, separation from children, frigid temperatures, people dying in the street, and then it gets even worse as Leningrad is surrounded by the Germans and cut off from any outside food supplies. Vera's beloved sister, Olga, dies, as well as her grandmother, and her mother. Finally, Sasha manages to arrange for Vera and his children to escape Leningrad, but wee Leo is dying. :-( Vera must make the heart wrenching decision to send Anya alone on the train to her father while she spends Leo's last two days with him in the hospital. After his tragic ending, she then gets on the train and when she steps off at the end of her journey, there are Sasha and Anya waiting for her....for a split second, until a German bomb drops on them right before her eyes and blows them sideways. Vera is knocked unconscious and wakes up in the hospital, and told that there were no other survivors. No longer caring if she lives or dies, she walks through the snow and gives herself up to the Germans, spending the rest of the war in one of their prison camps until she is finally liberated by an American soldier who ends ups falling in love with her, marrying her, moving her to the United States and becoming the father of Meredith and Nina! It becomes clear to Meredith and Nina, after all these years, that their mother couldn't open herself up to loving other children, only to possibly lose them, so their father tried to supply love enough for both parents. They have extreme empathy for their mother and what she bravely went through and come to understand her, finally. And Vera finally tells her daughters that she IS proud of them and that she loves them both. They decide to take their mother on a cruise to Alaska to meet a Russian historian who had, years before, written to Vera to hear her story for his book on the Leningrad millions who lost their lives during the horrific war conditions. When they arrive in the small, predominantly Russian, Alaskan coastal town, they meet a cafe owner, Stacy, who is happy to meet the elderly, Russian Vera. When Vera sees the old, frayed wedding picture of herself and Sasha among Stacy's belongings, they all come to the realization that Stacy aka Anastasia aka Anya, is really Vera's long lost daughter!! It turns out that both she and her father, Sasha, had survived the bombing and searched for Vera for years, not knowing she was in a prison camp, and later in America. It's a basically happy ending, as the sisters all meet one another, and Vera is reunited with her beloved Anya, but there is so much tragedy throughout the book. I enjoy reading the historical novels like this, but there is so much sadness in history.