An ebullient novel about family secrets and the triumph of sisterly love Driven by a legacy of lies, the shame of their own imperfections, and impending chaos in each of their well-ordered married lives, the three Wasserman daughters struggle with themselves and one another to break their parents' silence and understand their past. Shoshanna, control freak and world-class problem solver, stands on the brink of a Big Birthday in the shadow of the Evil Eye, trying to enjoy her happiness and to overcome her fears while also engineering a double reconciliation between her estranged sisters, and between Leah and their rabbi father. Leah, a brilliant English professor and unreconstructed leader of the left, eloquent and foul-mouthed, a crusading feminist and a passionately conflicted wife and mother, grapples with the meaning of abandonment and the unfamiliar demands of her own roiling needs. Rachel, who has papered over her losses with an athlete's discipline, a fact fetishist's sense of order, and a pragmatism bordering on self-sacrifice, watches her carefully constructed world fall apart and in the rubble discovers the woman she was meant to be. Three Daughters is a rich and complex story of three lives, their loves, and the web of relationships that either hold these lives together or hopelessly entangle them. The first novel by Ms. magazine cofounder and nonfiction writer Letty Cottin Pogrebin ( Deborah, Golda, and Me ), Three Daughters is a story of estrangement and reconciliation. Fifty-year-old Shoshanna Safer leaves her beloved planner on the roof of her car and, retracing her steps, finds only a few pages fluttering across the Henry Hudson Parkway. "The curator of her commitments"--holder of gift lists, addresses, phone numbers, appointments, credit cards, and receipts--this planner was the lynchpin of her social and professional lives. Taking its loss as symbolic, Shoshanna turns her organizational fervor to a goal that needs no date book: the reuniting of her father Samuel, a rabbi, with his eldest daughter Leah, a radical feminist with a bristly demeanor, a Mensa-level intellect, and a fondness for the F word. Similarly, she wants to heal the breach between Leah and Rachel, the suburban sister, whose adolescent sportiness gave way to an unfashionable devotion to religion and homemaking. Pogrebin has a playful way with words, and even when she lingers too lovingly on her characters' quirks, burbling on for a few extra pages here and there, the reader isn't likely to complain. Three Daughters is an auspicious fictional debut and a great gift for sisters. --Regina Marler Of course these three daughters are estranged, but crusading optimist Shoshanna intends to smooth things over with brilliant, angry Leah and withdrawn Rachel. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. Pogrebin, one of the founders of Ms. magazine and the author of numerous works of nonfiction, offers a dazzling debut novel. The three middle-aged Wasserman sisters share a dysfunctional background but no longer have very much in common. After their father, an esteemed rabbi who has relocated to Israel, announces he will return to New York for the millennium and wishes to celebrate with his three daughters, it is up to Shoshanna, the professional problem solver, to orchestrate a reunion of the estranged family members. Ironically, just as she resolves to achieve this minor miracle, the superorganized Shoshanna loses her precious Filofax and with it control of her well-regulated life. As she struggles with both major and mundane problems, her two older sisters must reconcile with the demons of their pasts in order to face each other and their long-absent father. Pogrebin does a superb job of interweaving several complex personal histories into a humorous and heartbreakingly honest family melodrama. Margaret Flanagan Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved "More than anything else, this is a novel about family, in a Jewish sense -- about the impossibility of regarding oneself as an individual when every action has the power to change another person's life . . . Pogrebin offers an incisively honest assessment not only of the feminist movement, but of the high price exacted from those who attempt to live without compromise." - Moment "A dazzling debut novel . . . Pogrebin does a superb job of interweaving several complex personal histories into a humorous and heartbreakingly honest family melodrama." --Booklist Letty Cottin Pogrebin is the co-founder of Ms. magazine, a nationally known lecturer, and author of eight books of nonfiction, most recently Deborah, Golda and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America and Getting Over Getting Older, a memoir. Three Daughters is her first novel. She lives with her husband in New York City.