num_pages: 295
description: 'I should have known that this would happen. My granddaughter is too like me, My daughter too. Sometimes holding something too tightly, trying to guide it too closely will only make it turn against you. Like a river bursting through the dikes and dams and flooding over the fields.'Ilana has her ways. They are old ways, the ways of the forest, full of magic and mystery, elemental, fundamental. When she leaves the deep, dark, ancient lands of the east for a new life in a bright new country, she carries the spirit of the forest with her, and hopes she can create her own way, create her own story. For her, her daughter Sashie, for her granddaughter Mara and even her great-granddaughter Nomie, in the stories of their lives men are mostly absent, children are mostly wayward, the past is ever present and survival is slippery.If I Told You Once is a bewitching tale of the ineffable and the inescapable; and Judy Budnitz, a storyteller fit to keep company with the Brothers Grimm, leads her reader through a world imagined as hard as it is lived. Her women are as indelible as the stories that mark them. Their wit and wiles are something to behold. And their world is one Budnitz's reader will never quite be able to leave behind.
language: English
title: If I Told You Once
titlecomplete: If I Told You Once
genres: Literary Fiction, Magical Realism, Contemporary, Russia, Fantasy, Novels, Fairy Tales, Fiction, School, Historical Fiction
ratings_count: 910
awards: awardedAt: 946713600000
name: Orange Prize
category: Fiction Shortlist, awardedAt: 946713600000
name: Edward Lewis Wallant Award
publisher: Flamingo