Book Review: How to Love Your Daughter by Hila Blum translated by Daniella Zamir

´I see all the peculiar ways in which mothers prepare their daughters for life, ad they are always suffused with sorrow´.

Daughters at the puberty age are complicated beings. Mothers of daughters, mothers of unique children in general are double complicated: once by their condition and secondly, their condition is amplified by the impossible conditions of their daughters. Contorsed bodies of paper blow by the wind of desires.

How to Love Your Daughter, by Jerusalem-based writer and editor Hila Blum, translated from Hebrew by Daniella Zamir is a story of mother-daughter alienation. A crescendo going back to the source of the separation, an innocent yet existentially breaking lie, made of too much love. We are repeatedly shared the details of the separation, for how long, how it enfolded, the relative moments of communication. But until towards the end of the story, we are unable to fathom the reason. 

Told by the mother, the story has apparently nothing dramatic, there is no traumatic event that may explain the radical separation. Leah is a well beloved unique daughter of a middle class family, intelligent moderately beautiful and living a protected life. ´We had Leah. She was one of those girls who was endlessly loved by their parents and just a little less loved by the rest of the world; and there came a time when I sensed she resented that. The disparity. Maybe she didn´t find herself pretty. But to her father and me she was the most beautiful girl in the world, and the love of our lives´. 

But when the parents are blinded by love, ignoring the moral compass and the ethical values, encouraging their children to protect themselves, only for love, may be wrong. May lead to wrongs of the highest kind. Sometimes, our children don´t want blind protection, this is not the love they expect from us. This is not love.

How to Love Your Daughter is relatively short but made of perfectly refined fragments, concise yet powerful. For me, it´s one of the best book about mothers and daughters I´ve read in a long time, a book that will stay with me for a very long time.

Rating: 4.5 stars