Reviews
“What if we could learn the stories our mothers didn’t tell us? Through the powerful magic of love, grief, imagination, and the grit that her mother instilled in her, a daughter brings her mother’s untold journey to life in cinematic detail. Readers will be transported and deeply touched.”
–Elizabeth Seay, author of Searching for Lost City: On the Trail of America’s Native Languages
“Immigrant Daughter: Stories You Never Told Me is a search for a mother’s traumatic history and a daughter’s cultural identity. As Kapphahn takes the reader on her mother’s harrowing experience in WWII Zagreb and escape from Communist Yugoslavia, she digs into her grief with searing language that illuminates the emotional impact of war and upheaval on the body. Such an engagement with her history and culture gradually unfolds intricate layers of love and acceptance. This memoir’s brilliance lies in its overlapping narratives that amplify universal experiences of loss and longing, transforming pain into transcendence.”
–Nancy Agabian, author of Me as Her Again
“The memoir crackles with imagination, raw feeling, and the kind of stark empathy we come to literature precisely to experience. The two key threads of the book–the author’s and her mother’s–play off one another with a delicate harmony I’ve rarely seen in memoir, showcasing Kapphahn’s ability to use both her personal experience and her mother’s unique, striking narrative to build an intimate story about longing, identity, and how the imprints of our family histories can echo, strangely, through the actions of our present.”
–Mike Scalise, author of The Brand New Catastrophe
“In this moving study of her mother’s past, Catherine Kapphahn has shown how traumatic historical events can enter a family’s bloodstream. The bond between mother and daughter – forged in a new world so full of promise, marked by the darkness of times past – sings with tenderness and urgency.”
–Courtney Angela Brkic, author of The First Rule of Swimming and The Stone Fields
“By braiding together her own, present-day journey of discovery with her mother’s, Kapphahn shows us how we can be cosmically linked to those we love – across physical and temporal barriers – and emerge whole, through the will of our imagination.”
–Brenda Lin, author of Wealth Ribbon: Taiwan Bound, America Bound
“Kapphahn weaves together a book that is both a memoir of a fascinating woman and a history of a remarkable time period, all while meditating on questions of illness and grief with a quiet and honest grace.”
–Michelle Bailat-Jones, author of Unfurled and Fog Island Mountains
“An exceptionally well written and inherently interesting read from beginning to end, Immigrant Daughter: Stories You Never Told Me showcases author Catherine Kapphahn’s genuine flair for originality and narrative driven storytelling.”
—Midwest Review of Books
“An exceptionally well written and inherently interesting read from beginning to end, Immigrant Daughter: Stories You Never Told Me showcases author Catherine Kapphahn’s genuine flair for originality and narrative driven storytelling.”