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Drawing deeply on author Francine Rivers’ own emotional journey, Her Mother's Hope - sequel and resolution to Her Daughter’s Dream, is based on the strained relationship between Francine's mother and grandmother.
Set against the epic sweep of world war and ranging across continents, the two-book saga gives an expert and dramatic insight on the spoken and unspoken family breaks and bridges of love, sacrifice and forgiveness. The depth of feeling and heartfelt sincerity of both Her Mother's Hope and Her Daughter’s Dream is entirely due to Francine Rivers' own personal experience and painful research among members of her own closest family.
Inspired by a real family relationship
Francine’s grandmother and mother began the inspiration for the story. Although mother and grandmother loved one another deeply they were never able to express it. To get an understanding of the silent hurt between them, Francine nagged her grandmother to write her memoirs.
In fourteen pages she summed up over ninety years of her life. Francine found truths she’d never known before, such as the death of her grandmother’s younger sister after being fed cherries and beer. The sister wasn’t named nor was the impact of the death on the family described.
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Getting to the heart of the real story
On these revelations, Francine wrote the parallel story. She began with the facts but found the book’s characters, Marta and Hildemara, needed to become the 'real' story. Though they shared timelines with Francine’s grandmother and mother, they didn’t yet have lives of their own.
“I was too close to the story,” she says. Knowing that even massive revisions wouldn’t make it what she wanted it to be, the only solution was to scrap all 1200 written pages and start over again. Francine knew that adding fictional elements was vital to revealing the underlying truth.
Tearing down walls and building bridges
In Her Mother’s Hope, two character-making tragedies affect the lives of the immediate family and the next generations. Neither actually happened in Francine’s family, though she insists that every family suffers something of the sort.
The story follows the consequence of making a judgement from one side of a divide without fully understanding the other. As in real life, forgiveness is the only way back - finding ways to tear down walls and build bridges. Her Mother’s Hope is a story about how love often means sacrifice.
When love is shown but never spoken
Francine’s mother told her that Francine’s grandma never said “I love you”, though this was common in the generations where love wasn’t expressed in words but revealed in action. Francine’s mother also wrote journals but also never touched on her feelings.
Although she wrote daily, no pages covering the most traumatic 3 years of her life were found. Francine is certain her mother destroyed them. Her Mother’s Hope captures a picture of how a sense of betrayal arises within a family.
Francine Rivers: author snapshot
Francine Rivers became a born-again Christian in 1986. Already a successful writer, Francine wrote Redeeming Love as her statement of faith. Now an award-winning bestselling author of inspirational fiction, her more than 20 novels are translated into over twenty languages.
Progressing from her classic re-imagings of Bible narratives, Francine Rivers’ book, Her Mother's Hope is the sequel to her family inspired story, Her Daughter's Dream. At the heart of the project is the cause of the real-life estrangement between Francine’s grandmother and mother.
