by Nancy Richler,
A young Jewish girl arrives in Montreal to meet the man she is to marry. Unexplicably, he decides he cannot marry her. However, his brother asks her to marry him and they do get married.
There are two strangers at the wedding, a woman and her daughter. The woman is there to see if the woman, with the same name as her cousin, is her cousin. She isn't
The young Jewish woman is very reclusive, even though her husband dotes on her. She tolerates but isn't warm to her mother in law. The young Jewish woman has a daughter, and the disappears when the child is only three months. No one knows where she went, but both the strange woman and the mother in law know that she had taken on a false identity.
The focus of the story is the woman's daughter. She struggels to come to terms with why her mother would have abandoned her. At times she tries to find out where her mother is, but she is not aware that her mother is an imposter. She receives packages from her mother occasionally with a stone in them, the location and the temperature at the location - very puzzling and bizarre.
Eventually the girl finds out the truth. Her grandmother leaves her a note telling her a bit of her mother's history and her real name, when she dies. The girl eventually finds her mother's address and goes to visit her once but it comes to nothing, The girl returns the diary of the girl her mother pretended to be and a raw diamond to a Jewish museum in Palestine.
The book was interesting, but the ending was anticlimatic.
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