Five generations of Marchewka women struggle to cope with the hardships of emigration and assimilation in twentieth-century America as they battle to preserve family traditions and deal with the realities of modern life Leslie Pietrzyk's Pears on a Willow Tree starts with a recipe for pierogi and ends with one for poppy-seed cake. In between, four generations of Polish-American women talk, cook, argue, sew each other's wedding dresses, tell stories, and understand and misunderstand each other in the way that only mothers and daughters can. Starting with iron-willed Rose, who emigrates from Poland, and ending with Amy, who flees the role of her alcoholic mother's keeper, the Marchewka women enact an ancient dance of embracing and rejecting the tradition they come from. "It is the girls who keep the family alive," Rose writes to her Polish mother; but it is also true that, as she later tells her great-granddaughter, "It's impossible for a good daughter to leave; it's impossible for a good daughter to stay." Many of the chapters in Pears on a Willow Tree were first published as stories, and they sometimes hang together a trifle too neatly, with none of a novel's usual depth or range. But Pietrzyk has a nifty, uncluttered prose style and above all a keen ear for the way women really do talk. Pears on a Willow Tree is a promising debut from a writer with a gift for the enduring art of domestic portraiture. "If we know we can't have the thing we want most, why does our desire for it never lessen?" asks Amy, the fourth generation of Polish women in this memorable first novel. Although there are snatches of Polish lore and cuisine, this taut story is really about mothers and daughters. From Rose, who in 1919 writes to her mother in Poland that she has a new, American name, to Helen, who made her peace with old ways and new in Detroit, to Ginger, who left the family she found suffocating only to find another kind of slow asphyxiation in alcohol, to her daughter Amy, who taught English in Thailand but holds the ties of memory her mother tried so hard to cut, the tale dips and weaves like the ebb and flow of voices overheard from the kitchen. Pietrzyk is neither sentimental nor detached; instead, her women, tied by blood, sound like relatives we recognize. Similar in its grace and theme to Anna Monardo's lovely Courtyard of Dreams (1993). GraceAnne A. DeCandido Pears on a Willow Tree suggests untapped gifts of eye and ear.... Given greater scope, the humor and outrage that only glint here and there could have rivaled the intoxicating, exhilarating effects of Ginger's gin. Nevertheless, this novel, heartfelt and game, augurs well. -- The New York Times Book Review , Ann Harleman LESLIE PIETRZYK's fiction has been published in numerous literary journals, including Triquarterly, Iowa Review, Gettysburg Review, and New England Review. She lives in Alexandria, Virginia, and is Director of Communications at an area Chamber of Commerce. She has been awarded blue ribbons at the Virginia State Fair for her banana bread and chocolate chip cookies. PEARS ON A WILLOW TREE is her first novel.