If I Told You Once - Hardcover

In her novel about mothers, daugthers, and love, Judy Budnitz gives the traditional folktale an electrifying twist as she follows four generations of women from an Eastern European village to the tenements of an American city.
Illana, eager to escape her formidable mother's all-consuming love, embarks on an epic journey to the New World and is met along the way by evil, magic, and good fortune. The daughter, granddaugther, and great-granddaughter who follow in her footsteps share her special powers of observation, and, often, destruction.

The astonishing Orange Prize-shortlisted debut from the author of 'Flying Leap' and 'Nice Big American Baby'. This is a truly strange and striking tale that begins in the deep, and deeply magical, European forest, in the world depicted in Chagall's paintings and Grimms' Fairy Tales, and proceeds to tell the story of four generations of women from one fated family. Budnitz builds her book with wit and art somewhere in the gaps between magic realism, family saga and female bildungsroman. She marries great technical skill to quirky humour and dizzying metaphor. She has an uncanny knack for the destabilizing and indelible image, but does not abandon sense for sensibility. She is always readable, albeit strangely so. She might yet be an Americanized heir to the throne left vacant by Angela Carter.