The significant characters in Her Mother's Daughter are the women.

Frances, the Polish-born grandmother, shapes her daughter Belle's life in many important ways, as reflected in Belle's life-long lament, "My mother never combed my hair." This simple statement encompasses all the unmet needs a little girl felt but could not express to an overworked mother.

Belle is easily the most compelling figure in the story. Sometimes bright and chirpy, sometimes picky and critical to the point of unreason, she haunts her daughter Anastasia's inner life even when Anastasia is in her fifties.

The reader hears what Anastasia hears and what she thinks, but the miasma of Belle's emotional reactions hangs over all her daughter's decisions. This centrality of the narrator's mother is no accident. It brings the braided nature of the "mother-knot" into sharp focus.

Anastasia or "Stacey" is the "modern" woman who, at some cost, wins the...