With rare literary exceptions to the contrary, mother-daughter relationships are often romanticized and idealized, and cosseted from stringent social analysis. In this insightful novel, Aysan Sev’er explores the love, caring, sacrifice, as well as the tensions and conflict, in mother-daughter relationships through the lives of four generations of women. The setting for the first generation is located within the crumbling Ottoman Empire, and the eventual birth of the Republic of Turkey. Reflected in the lives and prejudices of the earlier generations, history is a backdrop to the novel. The second generation of women stay in the Republic, while some members of the third generation settle in Canada. Over the geographical and cultural differences, mothers and daughters continue their often close, sometimes turbulent contact, while they grow into very dissimilar adults.