Costalegre

by Courtney Maum

It is 1937, and Europe is on the brink of war. In the haute-bohemian circles of Austria, Germany, and Paris, Hitler is circulating a most-wanted list of “cultural degenerates”—artists, writers, and thinkers whose work is deemed antithetical to the new regime.  To prevent the destruction of her favorite art (and artists), the impetuous American heiress and modern art collector, Leonora Calaway, begins chartering boats and planes for an elite group of surrealists to Costalegre, a mysterious resort in the Mexican jungle, where she has a home. 

The story of what happens to these artists when they reach their destination is told from the point of view of Lara, Leonora’s neglected 15-year-old daughter, who has been pulled out of school to follow her mother to Mexico. Forced from a young age to cohabit with her mother’s eccentric whims, tortured lovers, and entourage of gold-diggers, Lara suffers from emotional, educational, and geographical instability that a Mexican sojourn with surrealists isn’t going to help. But when she meets the outcast Dadaist sculptor Jack Klinger, a much older man who has already been living in Costalegre for some time, Lara thinks she might have found the love and understanding she so badly craves. 

Sinuous and striking, heartbreaking and strange, Costalegre is heavily inspired by the real-life relationship between the heiress Peggy Guggenheim and her daughter, Pegeen. Acclaimed author Courtney Maum triumphs with this wildly imaginative and curiously touching story of a privileged teenager who has everything a girl could wish for—except for a mother who loves her back. 

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Art, Literary Fiction, Historical, World War II, Novels

240 pages, Hardcover

First published July 16, 2019

About the author

Courtney Maum is the author of the novels Costalegre (a GOOP book club pick and one of Glamour Magazine’s top books of the decade), I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You and Touch (a New York Times Editor’s Choice and NPR Best Book of the Year selection), and the handbook Before and After the Book Deal: A writer’s guide to finishing, publishing, promoting, and surviving your first book, out now from Catapult. Her writing has been widely published in such outlets as the New York Times, O, the Oprah Magazine, and Poets & Writers. She is the founder of the collaborative retreat program, The Cabins, and she also has a writing-advice newsletter, “Get Published, Stay Published,” that you can sign up for at CourtneyMaum.com

Reviews

[Courtney Maum · Rating 5 out of 5]

BEST BOOK I'VE EVER READ.

[Julie Ehlers · Rating 3 out of 5]

Costalegre is one of those books that's easier to admire than to enjoy. In this short novel, a wealthy socialite named Leonora gets a small group of artists and writers out of Europe ahead of WWII and settles them in a remote house on the coast of Mexico. Anyone who's ever seen a season of The Real World or Survivor knows there's no way all these strong personalities are going to get along for more than a few days at a time. Leonora is apparently based on Peggy Guggenheim; the writers and artists are based on real writers and artists; and 14-year-old Lara, our narrator, is the daughter Leonora neglects in favor of both art and the attention and "love" her financial support of the arts can garner her. The book also contains excerpts from a real book about Mexican flora, and includes a few of Lara's own drawings as she strives to become an artist in her own right.

This novel is well-intentioned and it has its good points, most particularly a strong sense of place, but to me it felt labored, trying to do too much in its short length. Lara is the only kid at the house in Costalegre and isn't privy to everything that's going on there; all we know is what she tells us. There's a pervasive feeling that she, and by extension the reader, is always outside of the real story—not just the story of her mother and the artists, but the story of what's happening over in Europe and to the people they left behind. This is no doubt intentional, and it does give the reader a strong sense of Lara's emotional isolation... but it also strands the reader outside most of the action and mutes what should be vivid. I think this book achieved what it set out to do; I'm just disappointed that what it achieved wasn't more appealing to me. I hope the next novel I read has a much stronger protagonist who's allowed to be at the center of her own story.

I won this book via the Tin House Galley Club. Thank you to the publisher.

[Tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am SO glad I own a copy of this beautifully crafted book (both the actual book and the writing), as it will go on my shelf of favorites. I absolutely LOVED Maum's novel and can't say enough good things about it. It is not written in a traditional format and is heady with language, knowledge, and artistic sensibility from start to finish. Maum uses the diary/sketchbook format perfectly for 15-year-old Lara, and the voice she invests Lara with is one of the most pitch perfect character voices I've ever read. Lara's wish to be "considered" is both heartbreaking and triumphant.

The story is loosely based on Peggy Guggenheim's dysfunctional relationship with her daughter Pegeen, and the artists she supported and saved during WWII. The rest of the story is all Maum's brilliant crafting. The setting (1937 Mexican jungle, while Europe is on the brink of war) works to frame this exotic story full of surreal artists, and I kept pausing to marvel at Maum's brilliant prose and ability to write original, deep prose. I keep using the word brilliant. It's my reaction to the book, as I'm a lover of hybrid fiction, and by my standards this is one of the best books I've read in recent memory. Please give this beautiful book by Tin House a second look, if you haven't yet read it. There's a reason it was on so many good hit lists! It will be hard for Maum to follow this, but I'm confident she'll do so.

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

The year is 1937. A bitter little man disparagingly nicknamed Schlecty (better known to the world as Hitler) has declared a ban on modernism in the Reich. His former art school mates, denounced as degenerates, have been bankrolled by Leonora Calaway (think: Peggy Guggenheim) and fled to the jungles of Costalegre. And bearing witness is Leonora’s neglected 14-year-old daughter Lara, whose insights and observations drive the story.

Temporarily unschooled and unmoored and unloved by her mother, Lara catalogs the indigenous plants, knowing that she and her mother’s entourage of surrealists, Dadaists, and outcasts are all displaced species. When Jack Klinger, a rebel who may be the one artist her mother doesn’t control arrives, an infatuated Lara regards him as a sense of solidness amidst the mayhem.

This is a lovely book, filled with longing and yearning, of a girl on the cusp of adulthood who straddles the barriers between privilege and want. All of the themes of coming-of-age are here: loneliness and alienation, desire and want, internal growth and the power of imagination.

Most of the characters are inspired by real-life counterparts—Guggenheim and her real-life daughter Pegeen, artists such as Andre Breton, and more. The location of Costalegre also plays a role: lush, exotic, filled with myths and tales, fodder for a young would-be writer and diarist. It’s a fine book that dazzles the reader.

[Paltia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Costalegre translates to coast of joy. For Lara, the 15 year old diarist, it is more like the jungle of interpersonal relationships. Her father and brother have remained in Switzerland as WWII rages on. Her mostly indifferent mother has brought her to live in Mexico along with a group of artists. Lara refers to them as loons. She feels invisible. She writes of how nice it would be to have someone to hold and tell your secrets to - instead of a diary which has no arms. The jungle is a place that hints at the possibility of danger. “ it is an ultimate foolishness to brave the jungle alone.” One of the artists living at the casita has created a painting which includes Lara. It hints at the possible dangers and terrifying possibilities of her sexuality. Her nightshirt stops above her buttocks and then nothing until her slippers. “The pink cleft and blue shoes. Things she is supposed to forget.” All around is the heat. The rain that threatens to arrive. Lara realizes there’s something dangerous out there but with little to keep her at home she hops astride a horse and off she goes. The story of a lonely adolescent female desperate for someone to care. I was left with this thought. When safety is chosen over pleasure the joy renounced will always remain in one’s memory.

[Maureen · Rating 1 out of 5]

1.2 stars only because it is an arbitrary number to represent the arbitrary nature of this book. Aimless, plotless, pointless, ineffectual, and a futile effort at a poorly executed vanity project. The only good thing I have to say about it is that I am done with it. I hated this book.

[Megan Aruta · Rating 2 out of 5]

FULL REVIEW HERE: meganprokott.com/costalegre-courtney-...

Here’s the thing about this book. I was SO excited to pick it up because it has so many of my favorites themes: Art, dramatic family relationships, & secretive travel to name a few. However, from the very first page I could not get into the writing style, which I blame almost completely on the vehicle for the story. Narrating for the reader throughout is the diary of a young girl who was bored, listless, and struggling to find her place.

And let me just say, reading the perspective of a 15-year-old was such an irritating experience. I couldn’t get myself to care about her observations about the artists and her surroundings, and I really couldn’t have been less invested in her perspective. I think my main issue with Lara as the driving force for this actually really interesting story is that Lara didn’t know about anything that was happening in their eccentric community of artists and collectors and, by extension, neither did the reader. I always felt slightly removed from the story and I think the reason for that is because Lara, our narrator, was always removed herself from the goings-on and the actual interesting parts of the story.

[switterbug (Betsey) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a spare, elegiac, poetic, and moving book of longing, especially the hunger for parental love. I read it in one sitting. But I ask myself—would I have liked it as much if it wasn’t an historical, fictional portrait about the daughter of the celebrated and enigmatic Peggy Guggenheim? Did that add just the right mystique, knowing that this wasn’t just ANY fourteen-year-old? It’s hard for me to say, as that fact pervaded the narrative. However, I was transported by the voice of the narrator, Lara, the daughter of the art philanthropist, Leonora. The relationship is fraught, as the mother is a self-centered and self-serving woman incapable of love.

Written like a diary by Lara, she also includes letters to her brother and the botanical lexicon of numerous plants and flowers of the exotic locale, Costalegre, on the Pacific and western side of Jalisco, in Mexico. It is 1937, and Hitler’s power is gaining momentum. There have been several movies and books (fiction and non-fiction) about the “heroes” who hid some of the great art from the Nazis, so that Hitler wouldn’t destroy it (if it didn’t conform to his politics). Here is another—but the thrust of the novel is not about the adventure of hiding the art; it is about an intelligent, artistic, and neglected adolescent girl seeking love and connection.

Leonora has taken Lara, her current husband, and several surrealist artists with her to Costalegre, where she feels secure from Hitler’s advances. She awaits a boat that is supposed to be coming, stored with the art that Leonora wants to sequester away for safe keeping. She doesn’t care that she has taken her daughter out of school and far away from her brother. Her concern is her art/artists, good food, sex, attention, and having control over everyone in her life.

There’s a lot of white space in this book, which allowed room for me to silently convey my thoughts and feelings in response to Lara’s words. Her sensitivity and maturity is eloquently manifested, despite her mother’s indifference. She seeks kinship during her sojourns on the island, and I was captivated by her awkward but tender appeal to attain a deep connection and understanding.

“That he will tell me something and it will be true. That he will continue to live in his small house…and listening to people…I don’t think I have ever been contemplated.” Like all of us, Lara yearns to be contemplated, observed, considered. She craves affection and reciprocity. Her growth pains and emotional hunger pains are lightly stated but deeply felt.

[Marcy Dermansky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Courtney Maum takes us into this other world, where 15-year-old Lara lives in a world of eccentric artists escaping World War II. Hitler, we learned, made terrible water colors. And Lara wants to paint and to be loved and to have a door to her room.

[Kelly Well Read · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm reviewing Costalegre by Courtney Maum as I just turned the last page and it's still fresh on my mind. I will tell you that this is not a book I would normally choose to read, but after reading it I am again so impressed with the titles coming from Norton and Tin House lately. I loved The Key to Treehouse Living last year, Biloxi this year, and now this beautiful and strange novel, Costalegre.

Based loosely on the lives of Peggy Guggenheim, her daughter Pegeen, and the surrealist art movement that Peggy supported during WWII by rescuing numerous artist and artwork from "Schlechty" (the nickname for Adolf Hitler), the author has chosen to place all these characters in the jungles of Mexico instead of New York (which can be a "jungle' itself, when you think about it).

Costalegre is a slim novel narrated in journal entries by 14 year old Lara, who finds herself in a strange land with even stranger people, and most tragic of all, a mother, Leonora, who is so caught up in the "art" of her guests that she ignores her daughter and leaves her entirely to her own devices.

Without a tutor to educate her, Lara is learning about life from the kaleidoscopic world around her, with her only friends being the neglectful, narcissistic artists who struggle to "work" with few supplies, food, or inspiration. Since her father and brother stayed behind in Switzerland to wait out the war, Lara is truly on her own; and her only real pleasure is attempting to draw and paint herself, which the reader gradually realizes is the only way she can gain any attention from the self-obsessed adults orbiting her life.

The theme of "disappearing" resonates in this novel: horses, a goat, the servants, and finally some of the artists themselves disappear, too. Lara feels invisible, and when she is thrown from a horse and gone for a night, no one realizes she was even gone - she may have well disappeared herself.

When an older male artist, who has lived in Costalegre full time since escaping Germany, expresses dismay that Lara is living in such circumstances, is it any surprise that she latches onto the one person in her world who seems to care about her?

The novel ends rather suddenly, and at first I was disappointed that there wasn't more closure to the story. But upon reflection, I realized that I was feeling so much like Lara, having lived with her voice all day as I read: there is no closure for her in Costalegre. She knows not what the future holds for her, and when anything will get any better. She says near the end: "If I could speak the language here, I could call for a boat. But what kind of boat? To where? And I can't travel alone, not really. What a curse to be a girl!" And, "I should be an orphan; at least I'd be in school! At least people would make sure that I was in bed at night, at least, that! Instead of this, which is never-ending nothingness, nowhere for me to be."

She ends with the hope that the ship that her mother commissioned with all the art from Germany will sink, so "there'd be nothing left to fawn over and boast about and move around the world for and maybe she [Leonora] would be emptied enough to finally mother me."

Getting to know Lara has been beautiful and sad and worthy. Costalegre is a short novel with a much larger story than its length suggests, and the emotional impact will linger. Really well done.

Thanks to Tin House Books and W.W. Norton Library Marketing for the ARC.

[Tanja Ivovic · Rating 1 out of 5]

No stars. This book is nothing more than a bored teenagers poorly written diary. Waste of time and definitely not an adult book.

[Bonnie Brody · Rating 5 out of 5]

This gem of a novel takes place in 1937 as WWII is about to commence. Hitler is in power and he is rounding up people who do not support his regime, perceived degenerates, and political enemies. Artists are among those in danger. Leonora Calaway is a rich heiress who is very interested in art and has a wonderful surreal and dadaist art collection. In a sense she is an 'art groupie'. She tries to save some of the 'degenerate' artists who are about to be jailed or who have already been incarcerated. To do this she takes the artists to a remote area of Mexico called Costalegre and hires a boat to transport their art to Mexico. When the boat arrives, she wants to open a museum in this remote place.

The novel is told in the voice of Leonora's 14 year old daughter, Lara. Lonely and mostly ignored by her mother, Lara writes in her journal to try and understand the artists and the events occurring around her. She calls the artists 'the loonies', crazy people her mother collects. Her mother's husband is known as 'new father'. Lara yearns for stability intimacy and misses her best friend Elizabeth who lives in England. She misses her brother and 'real dad' as well. She worries that she is not getting schooling because her mother has neglected to hire a tutor for her. Lara is also distraught because her mother keeps moving from one place to another.

As Lara watches the Bacchannalian games and parties, she is often disgusted. She tries to find pleasure in being near horses and doing some drawing. She yearns for her mother's attention which, sadly, is not forthcoming. What Lara thinks is that her mother brought her along as a pretty ornament, not because she is loved. For the most part, the artists also ignore her and she views them as self-serving narcissists.

As Leora becomes aware of the different body types she views during the artists' drinking games and swimming parties, she develops a skewed self-image and borders on anorexia. She is desperate to have someone pay attention to her and acknowledge who she is. To this extent she becomes enamored of the outcast Dadaist artist Jack Klinger.

What might Lara do to get Jack's attention? How can she create something beautiful so that her mother will appreciate her? When will life be stable? These are the issues that a mature 14 year old ponders. Though privileged materially, she is a girl who wants a mother who loves her along with a stable homelife.

[Sarah B · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very strange story and now that I have finished it I am unsure what to think. The main character is Lara who if I recall correctly is 15 years old. She has been dragged by her mother, Leonara, to Oceidente in Costalegre - in live in a strange house at the top of a hill, a house with no bedroom doors (only curtains) and these bizarre round holes in the outer wall so anything can fly right into your room when it wants to. Her mother has a bunch of loony artists living with them and everyone is very bizarre - including her mother. The jungle around them is full of wildlife and the ever present heat is oppressive. Its set during the beginning of World War 2 and the artists have fled to Mexico to get away from the war.

The story is from Lara's viewpoint. It comes in short chapters about various things, like the lack of news and things Lara tries to do to keep busy.

At first I found this story kind of funny as there is some truly outrageous things going on but once I got further into the tale I realized it was kind of gloomy. Lara is forgotten and mainly ignored. She is there but none of the adults in the house actually care about her. She tries to fit in but she just doesn't. She is the kind who may think something in the head but remains silent as she is not brave enough to actually speak up. And it is very easy for more bolder people, especially artists who are focused on their projects, to totally forget such a person.

Towards the end of the book there were a few events that left me feeling very confused. I don't understand what was going on? And it was never explained either so that is a bit of a disappointment. Why put something like that into a book unless you explain it later?

And there are a lot of characters in here! I felt I never really got to know most of them, not in any meaningful way... One character I did feel I knew (besides Lara) is the cowboy named Jack. And while his role is much shorter he seemed to have a larger importance to the storyline. It helps that he had horses too. And he had a bit of wisdom too...

And yes, there is some horse stuff in here (which I had not expected). Lara goes for a ride and has a bit of an adventure. That is all I will say as I don't want to give things away. But the very unique horse stables is located at the bottom of the hill the house is on and there are many singing grooms there to care for the horses. But my, the stables sure are vastly different than they are here! They do try to advise Lara but well she was a bit headstrong!

Another horse related bit in here I found just fascinating was the talk about how horses used to be used to predict weather and other things as well! Apparently horses know days ahead of time if it will storm? Or so the book says...

The tiger and the green plants on the cover represent the jungle environment. A tiger is not actually in the story. But the cover is beautiful!

There are also drawings in the book too. Black and white line drawings. My favorite is of the monkey like creature, the kinkajau, which I found out from google is also called the honey badger. It's related to the raccoon.

In the end I am not sure what this was about. Ok, I have an idea - that Lara should get out of that environment - but in the end nothing was actually settled. And if nothing was settled or solved, then what is the point? A 15-year-old cannot be expected to go live on her own. Where would she get money from? So I don't know...

A very strange story...

[Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love watching authors do their strange-historical-novel thing. A few recents that spring to mind include ISADORA, VISIBLE EMPIRE, AMERICA WAS HARD TO FIND, and now COSTALEGRE. Maum takes the story of the Guggenheims fleeing Europe before WWII to set up a surrealist enclave on the Pacific coast of Mexico, changes a few things (including names), and boils it all down into the diary of the daughter -- our fictionalized Pegeen Guggenheim, Lara Calaway -- whose insights are searing, funny, and altogether perfectly rendered.

(Note: this was a fun book to read interspersed w/ Tove Jansson's THE SUMMER BOOK, fwiw)

[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars. The fictional artists presented in this book supported by the fictional Peggy Guggenheim are sniveling, self centered egoists who it would be painful to spend time with. Written as an epistolary novel in the form of a diary by the fictional Pegeen Guggenheim (daughter of Peggy) who is 15 years old. The novel is successful in portraying her teenage angst and captures her voice reasonable well. However the other characters remain two dimensional and it is hard to see from this novel why Peggy Guggenheim felt their lives and art were worth saving.

[Tracy · Rating 2 out of 5]

This sounded so up my alley but I just could not get into it. I always feel bad rating a book that I don't finish except that the only books I don't finish are pretty bad so I feel the need to remind myself that I gave it a good try - I got more than 50% of the way through this one! I will say that it encouraged me to do my own research on Peggy Guggenheim so I appreciate that. I'm upset that I didn't know more about her when I was in Venice last year. We could see her house/museum out the window of our hotel room and I didn't even visit it.

[Halle Mahoney · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this one up as a Blind Date with a book at my local bookstore. The description sounded interesting but I found myself having to really concentrate when reading this book. It felt very fragmented and I really felt there wasn’t really a storyline. The writing was good but the book’s overall structure didn’t really make sense.

[Cassie (book__gal) · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.5) Costalegre is based loosely on art heiress Peggy Guggenheim and her daughter, Pegeen. It is narrated via diary entries from 15-year-old Lara after she has been transplanted to Mexico by her mother and her gaggle of eccentric artists, as fascism rises in late 1930s Europe. The slim novel is essentially a meditation on Lara’s yearning for her peculiar mother’s love, to be seen, to have a sense of stability that we all crave in the precarious teen years. The writing is simply lush.⁣
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“The surrealists think that passion is important, that nightmares are important. But they don’t value simplicity, which is how I think of love. This patient, tense, and quiet thing that is leaving someone alone."⁣
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“A pen in hand tempts misery from its shadows.”⁣
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“When I think of swimming underwater, I think of swimming through shattered wine glasses and the twisting, slow cravats.”⁣
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Maum has created a delicate and tender portrait of a girl on the cusp; of adulthood, love, freedom. At times I wanted more - more dialogue, more plot development, and had a small yearning for a fully-fleshed out novel of this daughter and mother living in a house of artists in the jungle, but I appreciate the book for what its intentions were. Sitting with Lara’s thoughts and musings as she navigates tumult gracefully was a delight.

[Kim McGee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lara has been whisked away to Mexico with her eccentric mother and her band of artist outcasts. In the lush jungle, this unlikely group of artists continues to create and complain, a bit lost after being forced out of Nazi Europe. Lara is our teen narrator and she navigates through her growing awareness of her own strengths and weaknesses and her ever distancing relationship with her mother. As she struggles to find herself and find her place among the artists, what she really is searching for is love and identity. The book is a continuous parallel between the calm and the violent. The jungle is calm and beautiful as a subject for art but hides deadly plants and animals as is the household where the artists and Mumma lash out in their frustration and art but the quiet ones are the people whose approval and attention matter the most to Lara. Lara is suspended between childhood with a total lack of supervision and attention and the adult world of love and the freedom to create. Based on true people and events, this slim novel speaks volumes. My thanks to the publisher for the advance copy.

[Jenny · Rating 2 out of 5]

I do not understand the "spellbinding" review. This was mostly a bunch of spoiled artists, an heiress, and her lonely daughter acting out the entire novel. I found it tedious and irritating. I am glad it was a shorter book. There were bits that could have been very intriguing, like the part where Jack talks about his history, but these were brief. I am giving it a two star rating, because I do not think the writing was bad at all. I think the content was annoying and lacked substance.

[Adrienne · Rating 1 out of 5]

I did not like anything about this book. It was a total waste of time.

[JoAnna S · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was okay, I enjoyed the setting and the backdrop of WWII. I think I just wasn’t very engaged with the story, it all moved a little fast/chaotic.

[Sheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book searching for writing about Peggy Guggenheim, with whom I have become fascinated of late. It seems to be historical fiction (one of my favorite genres), but is much much more fiction than history.
The historical part is: Peggy Guggenheim whisks a bunch of artists (surrealists and Dadaists---you know---degenerates) away from Europe to escape persecution at the start of WWII.
In reality she helped most of them to settle in New York City, whereas in this book she brings them all to a resort in the jungle in Mexico. The colorful characters are all based on actual artists and part of the fun for me was figuring out who was who.
(Her Salvador Dali character is a hoot, as is the Andre Breton character who makes everyone participate in dream analysis every morning)
The framing of the novel, though, adds a whole additional layer--- the story is told through the diary of Lara-- Leonora (the Guggenheim character)'s 15 year old daughter.
So along with a young teen girl's interpretation of the eccentric artists shenanigans, we also get glimpses of her teenage frustration at not being taken seriously as an artist among this cast of self absorbed characters, including her mother.
Having been taken out of school for this trip and with no tutor, Lara begins to educate herself on the plants in the area, and so the diary we read becomes a mix of reporting on the events of the days, her own art and emotions, and poetic descriptions of exotic fauna from a horticulture guide she finds on the property.
There is A LOT going on in this extremely short novel, and the author does an amazing job of writing in the voice of a frustrated and neglected (but also extremely privileged) teen girl.
If you are up to the challenge of pulling the story out of a rather experimental writing style, I highly recommend this book.

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was surprised to find that I enjoyed this by the end, despite a rocky start. Lara, the teenage daughter of a philanthropist, comes of age brutally and tragically in the shadow of an alternative-history WWII, where artists fleeing nazi Germany end up in Mexico, where they have lots of big, messy artist emotions matched only by Lara's own messy teenage emotions and first love. While this book did still leave me wanting...something, it worked well as a thoughtful collage of insights on creative practice, growing up, and moving from the small space of childhood to a larger one more connected with the outside world.

[Sharon Layburn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short novel is a stunner. Inspired by the complex relationship between art (and artist) collector Peggy Guggenheim and her daughter, Maum creates a vivid and striking voice in Lara, a precocious and lonely girl coming of age in a tumultuous time.
Despite the quick read, Lara will stay with you.

This ARC was provided by Tin House Books/Norton, in exchange for an honest review.

[Stephanie Barko · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review copy received from Texas Book Festival in advance of my leading a panel at the 2019 Festival, featuring Courtney Maum and Thomas Mallon, who also wrote a novel based on a famous person-- Courtney's book based on Peggy Guggenheim and Thomas' on George W. Bush.

Favorite lines:
"The ocean is a place that takes you."
"My mother doesn't know what to do with other women except try to dress like them".
"...she was one of those people whose brain was an insult to her head."

Protagonist Lara, 15, is a fictionalized Pegeen Vail, who was Peggy Guggenheim's daughter by her first husband. If love is longing, then Lara has it down pat. Longing to be noticed, longing to be listened to, longing to be loved.

Pegeen died in 1967 at 41 from a drug overdose after two marriages and four kids. We don't know what happens to Lara after she leaves Costalegre, but I sure hope Courtney Maum writes us a sequel so we find out.

This novel is a feast of space, both inner, outer, and on the page itself, which is interspersed with diary entries, random thoughts, and poetic meanderings. The style reminds me of being that age and being so unsure of really everything and feeling like I was always anxiously waiting to be someone else.

Read it! You'll relate.

[Jessica Klahr · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was in just the right mood for this quick, smart, and funny novel and I absolutely loved it. I liked that the concept was really honed in on and we only got the bare bones of the group of artists and their tribulations in Mexico; things could have easily veered into the overly historically informative and complicated but there was a fine balance. Lara was a good choice for the point of view character. We got to experience the landscape and the people with her and learn as we went along. There were quite a few artists to keep track and but they were all distinct enough that I never got confused. The dialogue was witty and really captured these people and this time. I liked Lara’s relationship with Jack and how it contrasted with that of the one with her mother. Leaving things semi open ended also left me feeling the effect that the story would still go on. The almost hybrid elements of the story were also well done, where we got to see dispatches from Lara’s journals and letters and drawings, as well as excerpts from her reading. This was such a good book that I almost wish it was a little longer, but it accomplished so much with such a low page count that I understand that it works best like this. Thank you to the Tin House Galley Club for sending me an early copy of what is destined to be one of my favorite books of the summer.

[Christa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel, I believe, did exactly what it intended to do - that is, present the mostly realistic journal of a lonely, neglected, somewhat immature, bored, angsty 15-year-old girl. That is, unfortunately, also the reason I found the book less than compelling. The girl, Lara, was not very insightful, and her entries lacked intimacy and reflection; they were mostly retellings of the days, and therefore I did not feel any more acquainted with her when I finished reading than when I started. Because the rest of the novel's eccentric characters are removed from their lives, and Lara is removed from knowing (most) of the adult secrets of their lives, I as a reader also felt distant from it all - which may have been the author's intention, and if so, that distance was realized as well. However, there was too much distance allow me care about the story. There were a few lovely moments, particularly the very last journal entry, and I also appreciated the lack of conventionality of the book.

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The surrealists think that passion is important, that nightmares are important. But they don’t value simplicity, which is how I think of love. This patient, tense, and quiet thing that is leaving someone alone.”

A new novel from Courtney Maum is always cause for celebration. This might be her finest yet. Compulsively readable, fiercely intelligent, with a cast of unforgettable characters. You’ll want to add this to your list!

[Shana · Rating 2 out of 5]

The premise of this book sounded so good, but unfortunately, the resulting story didn't really work. Modeled on Peggy Guggenheim, this novel takes place around a wealthy patron of the arts, her young teenage daughter, and a group of eccentric artists who leave Europe for rural Mexico as Hitler comes to power. Told from the perspective of the daughter, there are some interesting observations, but the book lacks emotion and ultimately falls flat.