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The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life

Jasmin Darznik · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

The Kitchen God's Wife

Amy Tan · 532 pages

Winnie and Helen have kept each other's worst secrets for more than fifty years. Now, because she believes she is dying, Helen wants to expose everything. And Winnie angrily determines that she must be the one to tell her daughter, Pearl, about the past--including the terrible truth even Helen does not know. And so begins Winnie's story of her life on a small island outside Shanghai in the 1920s,

Mother and DaughterFamily SecretsCultural IdentityImmigrant Protagonist
❤️

Everything I Never Told You

Celeste Ng · 300 pages

"Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. So begins the story of this exquisite debut novel, about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother's bright blue eyes and her father's jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unabl

Mother and DaughterCultural IdentityFamily SecretsImmigrant Protagonist
❤️

Secret Daughter

Shilpi Somaya Gowda · 352 pages

On the eve of the monsoons, in a remote Indian village, Kavita gives birth to a baby girl. But in a culture that favors sons, the only way for Kavita to save her newborn daughter's life is to give her away. It is a decision that will haunt her and her husband for the rest of their lives, even after the arrival of their cherished son.Halfway around the globe, Somer, an American doctor, decides to a

Mother and DaughterCultural IdentityFamily SecretsImmigrant Protagonist
❤️

Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

Marjane Satrapi · 187 pages

187 pages : illustrations ; 24 cmGN500L Lexile

Cultural IdentityMemoir & BiographyImmigrant ProtagonistFeminism
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Infidel

Ayaan Hirsi Ali · 353 pages

"Ultimately a celebration of triumph over adversity, Hirsi Ali's story tells how a bright little girl evolved out of dutiful obedience to become an outspoken, pioneering freedom fighter. As Western governments struggle to balance democratic ideals with religious pressures, no story could be timelier or more significant.--From publisher description."--From source other than the Library of Congress

Cultural IdentityImmigrant ProtagonistMemoir & BiographyFeminism
❤️

Dreams of Joy

Lisa See · 354 pages

A continuation of "Shanghai Girls" finds a devastated Joy fleeing to China to search for her real father while her mother, Pearl, desperately pursues her, a dual quest marked by their encounters with the nation's intolerant Communist culture.

Mother and DaughterFamily SecretsCultural IdentityImmigrant Protagonist
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The Liars' Club

Mary Karr · 320 pages

The Texas refinery town of Leechfield, perched on the swampy rim of the Gulf, is famous for mosquitoes and the manufacture of Agent Orange - a place where the only bookstores are religious ones and the restaurants serve only fried food. A handful of the Leechfield oil workers gather regularly at the American Legion Bar to drink salted beer and spin long, improbable tales. They're the Liars' Club.

Mother and DaughterFamily SecretsMemoir & BiographyEmotional
❤️

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

Jung Chang · 544 pages

"Jung Chang vividly evokes China's sights, sounds, and smells to create what must be one of the grimmest, yet most perceptive accounts of growing up middle-class in the maelstrom that has swept China since the 1920s." - Back cover.

Mother and DaughterMemoir & BiographyCultural IdentityFeminism
❤️

The Saffron Kitchen

Yasmin Crowther · 271 pages

In a powerful debut novel that moves between the crowded streets of London and the desolate mountains of Iran, Yasmin Crowther paints a stirring portrait of a family shaken by events from decades ago and worlds away. On a rainy day in London the dark secrets and troubled past of Maryam Mazar surface violently, with tragic consequences for her daughter, Sara, and her newly orphaned nephew. Maryam l

Mother and DaughterCultural IdentityImmigrant ProtagonistFamily Secrets
❤️

Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil

Deborah Rodriguez · 275 pages

Soon after the fall of the Taliban, in 2001, Deborah Rodriguez went to Afghanistan as part of a group offering humanitarian aid to this war-torn nation. Surrounded by men and women whose skills--as doctors, nurses, and therapists--seemed eminently more practical than her own, Rodriguez, a hairdresser and mother of two from Michigan, despaired of being of any real use. Yet she soon found she had a

Immigrant ProtagonistCultural IdentityFeminismMemoir & Biography
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Things I've Been Silent About: Memories

Azar Nafisi · 336 pages

I started making a list in my diary entitled "Things I Have Been Silent About." Under it I wrote: "Falling in Love in Tehran. Going to Parties in Tehran. Watching the Marx Brothers in Tehran. Reading Lolita in Tehran." I wrote about repressive laws and executions, about public and political abominations. Eventually I drifted into writing about private betrayals, implicating myself and those close

Mother and DaughterMemoir & BiographyCultural IdentityFeminism
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Black Cake

Charmaine Wilkerson · 385 pages

Cultural IdentityFamily SecretsImmigrant ProtagonistEmotional
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The Personal Librarian

Marie Benedict, Victoria Christopher Murray · 352 pages

In her twenties, Belle da Costa Greene is hired by J. P. Morgan to curate a collection of rare manuscripts, books, and artwork for his newly built Pierpont Morgan Library. Belle becomes a fixture in New York City society and one of the most powerful people in the art and book world, known for her impeccable taste and shrewd negotiating for critical works as she helps create a world-class collectio

Cultural IdentityMother and DaughterFamily SecretsFeminism
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The Rose Hotel: A Memoir of Secrets, Loss, and Love From Iran to America

Rahimeh Andalibian · 335 pages

"In this searing memoir, Iran-born author Rahimeh Andalibian tells the story of her family: their struggle to survive the 1979 revolution, their move to California, and their attempts to acculturate in the face of teenage rebellion, murder, addiction, and new traditions. Andalibian struggles to make sense of two brutal crimes: a rape, solved by her father, and a murder, of which her beloved oldest

Memoir & BiographyCultural IdentityFamily SecretsImmigrant Protagonist
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Do They Hear You When You Cry?

Fauziya Kassindja, Layli Miller Bashir, Fauziya Kasinga · 518 pages

Memoir & BiographyCultural IdentityImmigrant ProtagonistFeminism
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Memoir & BiographyCultural IdentityFamily SecretsImmigrant Protagonist
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Chinese Cinderella: The True Story of an Unwanted Daughter

Adeline Yen Mah · 224 pages

A riveting memoir of a girl's painful coming-of-age in a wealthy Chinese family during the 1940s.A Chinese proverb says, "Falling leaves return to their roots." In Chinese Cinderella, Adeline Yen Mah returns to her roots to tell the story of her painful childhood and her ultimate triumph and courage in the face of despair. Adeline's affluent, powerful family considers her bad luck after her mother

Memoir & BiographyCultural IdentityImmigrant ProtagonistEmotional
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The Lowland

Jhumpa Lahiri · 406 pages

Brothers Subhash and Udayan Mitra pursue vastly different lives--Udayan in rebellion-torn Calcutta, Subhash in a quiet corner of America--until a shattering tragedy compels Subhash to return to India, where he endeavors to heal family wounds.

Cultural IdentityFamily SecretsImmigrant ProtagonistEmotional
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Immigrant ProtagonistFeminismMother and DaughterCultural Identity
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Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

Trevor Noah · 297 pages

Trevor Noah’s unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents’ indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often ab

Mother and DaughterCultural IdentityMemoir & BiographyEmotional
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Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing

Anya von Bremzen · 338 pages

Born in a surreal Moscow communal apartment where eighteen families shared one kitchen, the author grew up singing odes to Lenin, black-marketeering Juicy Fruit gum at school, and longing for a taste of the mythical West. It was a life by turns absurd, drab, naively joyous, melancholy and, finally, intolerable.

Mother and DaughterImmigrant ProtagonistMemoir & BiographyCultural Identity
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Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Jeanette Winterson · 240 pages

Memories of the author about her difficult childhood as the adopted daughter of an English mother with strong religious convictions, and her subsequent search for her biological mother.

Mother and DaughterMemoir & BiographyEmotionalFamily Secrets
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The Boston Girl

Anita Diamant · 322 pages

A story "about family ties and values, friendship and feminism told through the eyes of a young Jewish woman growing up in Boston in the early twentieth century. Addie Baum is The Boston Girl, born in 1900 to immigrant parents who were unprepared for and suspicious of America and its effect on their three daughters. Growing up in the North End, then a teeming multicultural neighborhood, Addie's in

Cultural IdentityImmigrant ProtagonistFeminismMother and Daughter
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The Book of Ruth

Jane Hamilton · 328 pages

"I learned slowly, that if you don't look at the world with perfect vision, you're bound to get yourself cooked." Having come within an inch of her life, Ruth Dahl is determined to take a good look at it - to figure out whether, in fact, she's to blame for the mess." Pegged the loser in a small-town family that doesn't have much going for it in the first place. Ruth grows up in the shadow of her

Mother and DaughterFamily SecretsEmotionalNeglect

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