I adore the use of a Russian fairytale as a framing device in the narrative here; I have a weakness for fairytales.

The story follows a split narrative of a mother in Leningrad during WWII and her daughters around six decades later. The daughters do not truly know their mother until they begin to listen to her story. The death of their father has started them all down a path that they thought was just a fairytale, but will, in the end, allow them to begin to heal the relationship between them and their mother that has been fractured for their entire lives.

I highly recommend Winter Garden if you enjoy reading about relationships between strong women, historical fiction, or the power stories have in our lives.