Chicken Soup for the Soul: Like Mother, Like Daughter


There’s no denying that I love the Chicken Soup for the Soul books! All are enriching because of their diversity, and Like Mother, Like Daughter is especially poignant, filled with stories of absolute and unconditional love in that special bond between mother and daughter.

This particular compilation is even more special, bringing together stories (edited by Amy Newmark) from the 32 volumes of Chicken Soup for the Soul that were produced over a time span of 15 years, a goal that Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen never thought they’d attain. In it we find tales like that of a daughter’s story about how her mother loved to dance but became paralyzed with a spine tumor yet chose to advance intellectually and spiritually in order to be a good role model in My Mother’s Greatest Gift by Marie Ragghianti; a mother who finally realizes that her five-year-old daughter misses her grandfather, and gives her one of his blue sweaters to wear “as a hug” in The Sweater by Pamela Albee; a mother’s persistent care throughout her daughter’s early stages of leukemia even though the stress makes her break out in hives at the hospital (which she hides from her daughter) in The Power Of My Mother’s Love by Shana Helmholdt; a daughter who deteriorated through drug addiction at the very same time the mother was left by her husband, but the daughter returns to save Christmas in She Came Bearing Gifts by Luann Warner; and a mother who bicycled from New York City to San Francisco just to see the Pacific Ocean whose stories inspired her daughter to do the same, many years later, in The Bike Trip by Peggy Newbrand.

There is humor and anger and patience and trust and fear and silliness and, most of all, love in these stories, as women learn to understand their daughters and daughters finally come to see that what they thought was craziness on the part of their mothers was often wisdom. And all of the stories are true!

Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen always have ten chapters and 101 stories in each of their Chicken Soup for the Soul books, and in Like Mother, Like Daughter you won’t want to miss even one! There are so many topics that you can’t even start to count them all (e.g. that of a mother and daughter who each get different cactus plants that eventually lean towards each other and fall in love! in A Couple Of Cacti by Kelly L. Reno). You won’t want to put this book down, but if for any reason you have to do so, you can always come back to enjoy yet another uplifting story!

Grade: A

Themes: Mothers, Daughters, Love, Loss, Humor

Chicken Soup for the Soul: Like Mother, Like Daughter, 2008, by Amy Newmark, Jack Canfield and

Mark Victor Hansen

Chicken Soup for the Soul Publishing, LLC

Reviewed By:

Christina Zawadiwsky is Ukrainian-American, born in New York City, has a degree in Fine Arts, and is a poet, artist, journalist and TV producer. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Award, two Wisconsin Arts Boards Awards, a Co-Ordinating Council of Literary Magazines Writer’s Award, and an Art Futures Award, among other honors. She was the originator and producer of “Where The Waters Meet”, a local TV series created to facilitate the voices of artists of all genres in the media, for which she won two national and twenty local awards, including a Commitment to Community Television Award. She is also a contributing editor to the annual Pushcart Prize Anthology, the recipient of an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Library Association, and has published four books of poetry.

 

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