This was my first Kristin Hannah book, but it will not be my last. Winter Garden was difficult for me to read, but rewarding to complete. The story is about the Whitson family, who operated an apple orchard business in Leavenworth, Washington, a town I have visited many times. Evan Whitson married a very reserved Russian woman, Anya, and they have two daughters, who never feel loved by their mother. Anya is a distant, cold, and forbidding mother, but a devoted wife.
Just before his passing, Evan asks his daughter to promise to make their mother finish a Russian fairy tale she never completed. The Russian fairy tale is about the life of a young woman living in Stalinist Leningrad. The tale is about Anya’s life during the Siege of Leningrad by the Natzis in WW2 and the brutal violence that claimed the lives of 1.5 million Russians between 1941 and 1944. Leningrad is now Saint Petersburg, another place I have been fortunate enough to visit. As Anya tells her adult children about the pain and sorrow of the siege, I was drawn into the narrative to the point that I could read only two pages per day. Hannah describes the trauma of not only Anya and her family but the entirety of the Russian experience.