The Clean Daughter :

A Cross-Continental Memoir

HARDBACK. 341 Pages. NDSU Press. April 2022.

  • The Star Tribune calls The Clean Daughter “Luminous” and “Complicated”

  • Deb Marquart calls it “Masterfully Written,” “Rich and complex.”

  • Rain Taxi Book Reviews “An intriguing spin on the memoir genre.”

  • Dr Jessie Voigts says, “The Clean Daughter is hands down, the best memoir and intercultural book I’ve ever read!”

  • The National Association of Memoir Writers calls The Clean Daughter, “Brilliant and deeply moving.”

  • Collegeville Institute says, “Kandel’s warmth and keen insights make this memoir unforgettable.”

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What People are saying!

The Clean Daughter is a masterfully written story of an unusual life. I was completely swept up in the events of this elegant memoir.”

~ Deb Marquart, author of The Horizontal World.

“The Clean Daughter is astonishingly beautiful. I end the book changed. My heart bigger, my eyes wider. I am better because of it.”

~ Leslie Leyland Fields, author of Surviving the Island of Grace.

Jill’s Prairie Public Interview with Bill Thomas

Synopsis

“When Jill Kandel married Johan, a man from the Netherlands, she never imagined the influence her father-in-law, Izaak, would hold over her life. Beneath his calm demeanor and clerical garb, Izaak carried the wounds of growing up in Nazi- Occupied Holland. Childhood chaos led him to become a man who had all the answers.

For everyone. Except himself.

Izaak decided to end his life - while still a primarily healthy man - using legalized euthanasia in the Netherlands. The long tumultuous relationship between daughter-in-law and father-in-law was over. But Kandel couldn’t move on. Ten years later, still exhausted by thoughts of Izaak, she returned to the Netherlands searching for understanding.

The Clean Daughter is a story about building family across cultural, linguistic, and geographical divides. The complicated ways families both destroy and heal one another underpin Kandel’s story of a family held together by tenacity, curiosity, and courage.”

Two people, four continents, forty years!

The Clean Daughter :

A Cross-Continental Memoir

NDSU Press, April 2022