Mothers and Daughters

A Novel

By: Evan Hunter

Narrated by: Barrie Kreinik

Length: 22 hrs and 26 mins

Publisher's summary

New York Times best seller: A "monumental" saga of four ordinary American women from the author of The Blackboard Jungle (The New York Times Book Review).

Amanda, a small-town minister's daughter with hopes for a musical career, and Gillian, a hot-tempered aspiring actress from the Bronx, met at college. A decade later, one is happily married to an ambitious lawyer while the other is entangled in a passionate but troubled affair with a young man who's spent five years in a navy prison.

The other women in Amanda and Gillian's lives mirror the choices they make and the secrets they share. Gillian's mother-in-law, Julia, is haunted by a wartime affair and its tragic consequences. Amanda's precocious teenage niece, Kate, belongs to a booming postwar generation that will radically change American society. Nevertheless, Kate knows that many of the challenges she faces as a young woman have been met and endured by her aunt and countless other women throughout history.

Taking listeners on an emotional journey through mid-20th-century America, author Evan Hunter paints an indelible portrait of romance, friendship, and sisterhood. Mothers and Daughters is a wide-ranging and poignant masterpiece from one of America's most beloved storytellers.

©1961 Evan Hunter (P)2020 Audible, Inc.

Interesting read

A good story overall but seemed to jump around a lot. Sometimes hard to follow.

Enjoyable Novel by an Extremely Talented Author

This is an emotional and intellectually gratifying listen especially as it is given a fine dramatic narration by Barrie Kreinik when slowed to 90% speed of her interpretation. The younger members of today’s society speak with an almost absurd rapidity and apparently that sad fact is creeping into the Audible Book arena as well. Perhaps the most interesting fact about the novel is that it is primarily concerned with the lives of four females, a mother, two daughters that age over the course of the book and a very young daughter that grows into adulthood, all written by a male author, Evan Hunter, who was married thrice and fathered three sons. However, each of the four female protagonists are believable characters in the ways they act, how they think and what they think about. Hunter exhibits keen insight into the minds of these members of the fairer sex which is frankly surprising when considering how mysterious most women may be perceived by the enlightened male. Let’s face it, does a guy ever know a girl 100% keeping in mind that when you think you have reached a stage in the relationship where that understanding seems achievable, she might very will change. Hopefully, that’s not perceived as a sexist point of view. Perhaps the fact the book takes place in a much more civilized and functional time frame with The Empire at the apex of its domination of the world as opposed to the semi-dysfunctional society in which we live today with The Empire in decline assists Hunter in fleshing out his protagonists in a realistic fashion. Over the course of the approximately twenty years of real time that elapses, from the war years progressing through Ike’s two terms, the listener comes to know these girls/women as well as the men in their lives quite well. One becomes emotionally invested in these characters as well as enjoying the thought-provoking ideas from the pen of Hunter. There are several highly charged dramatic scenes which may enter the sub-genre of “melodrama” but nevertheless elicit, especially for this listener, strong emotional reactions. For this inveterate listener of Audible Books, this particular novel is a treasured find. After an extremely enjoyable listen of the author’s “Strangers When We “Meet”, “M & D” seemed a logical progression. Now, onto Hunter’s best-known work “The Blackboard Jungle”.