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blue: season
A literary mystery, set in the 1990 How did Molly, a promising musician and graduate student, end up in a Baltimore psychiatric hospital calling herself Lucia? Readers unravel the clues as hospital scenes alternate with Molly's journals. A story about memory, trauma, and Lucia Joyce -- the daughter of Irish writer James Joyce, who died in 1982 in the Swiss mental hospital where she'd lived for more than 40 years. For fans of The Secret History and The Archivist, as well as Girl, Interrupted.
510 pages, Kindle Edition
Published December 15, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 24, 2023
Blue:Season
by Chris Lombardi
reviewed by Aaron David Frishberg
I just finished Chris Lombardi’s Blue:Season. While it was on order, I had read Chris’s notes on the book, and learned that she admired Thomas Szasz’s Myth of Mental Illness. I e-mailed Chris, to say that she should try reading the work of R.D. Laing, and recommended that she start with Laing and Esterson’s Sanity, Madness and the Family, in which the authors take up the schizophrenic “rambling” of eleven patients, and by interviewing their families, illustrate the meaningful sense in the patients’ utterances.
Little did I know that Chris had independently reached this truth, until I started reading Blue:Season. The novel is set, for the most part, in a Baltimore mental hospital, and the heroine, sometimes labeled with multiple personality disorder, is a grad student who has immersed herself in the studying the life of James Joyce’s daughter Lucia, who spent most of her life in European asylums. While on a Baltimore psych ward, Molly O’Donnell alternates with Lucia as an identity.
Molly, it emerges, is who she is in substantial part because of the dysfunctional family in which she grew up. Parallel to Lucia, whom she suspects of molestation by the real-life James Joyce, she discovers the incest in her own past, a classic producer of mutiple-personality disordered personnae. Of course, there is a great deal more to the dysfunction from which Molly emerges, but to tell it would spoil the enjoyment of watching the pieces come together.
Prior to being injured while jogging by a hit-and-run driver, and ending up in the hospital, and thence in a psychiatric ward, Molly, a grad student in literature had been having an affair with a married lit professor, who apparently collected a grad student each semester. She had taught a summer course in which a student adamantly found evidence of incest in all the classics she read. Ironically, Molly would come to share this view, at least as to James Joyce.
As it happens, Joyce’s grandson, Stephen James Joyce, made a life’s work of guarding his grandfather’s name and reputation. I have a bookmark which quotes Isaac Asimov to the effect that any book worth banning is worth reading. Chris has not achieved quite the stature of a ban, but as she wryly comments on the estate’s warning that she could not quote from Lucia Joyce’s notebooks,” I can’t, but my characters can.”
It took me weeks to get through this novel, and now I am sorry its over. If we go by the dedication, which says that Chris’s wife, Rachel, loved this book long before she married Chris, the book has to have been written either before or during the time that Chris was spending fifteen years in writing the non-fiction I Ain’t Marchin’ Any More, Dissent and Resistance From Valley Forge to Chelsea Manning. I took a whole summer reading that one, so it was no secret to me that Chris could write up a storm. But fiction is something else, and Molly O’Donnell unfolds through these pages as a three-dimensional, if not more, character, her madness only an attribute of the opera-singing, shrink-defying, marathon running human being who comes alive on these pages.
If you’re listening, Amazon, five stars.
by Chris Lombardi
reviewed by Aaron David Frishberg
I just finished Chris Lombardi’s Blue:Season. While it was on order, I had read Chris’s notes on the book, and learned that she admired Thomas Szasz’s Myth of Mental Illness. I e-mailed Chris, to say that she should try reading the work of R.D. Laing, and recommended that she start with Laing and Esterson’s Sanity, Madness and the Family, in which the authors take up the schizophrenic “rambling” of eleven patients, and by interviewing their families, illustrate the meaningful sense in the patients’ utterances.
Little did I know that Chris had independently reached this truth, until I started reading Blue:Season. The novel is set, for the most part, in a Baltimore mental hospital, and the heroine, sometimes labeled with multiple personality disorder, is a grad student who has immersed herself in the studying the life of James Joyce’s daughter Lucia, who spent most of her life in European asylums. While on a Baltimore psych ward, Molly O’Donnell alternates with Lucia as an identity.
Molly, it emerges, is who she is in substantial part because of the dysfunctional family in which she grew up. Parallel to Lucia, whom she suspects of molestation by the real-life James Joyce, she discovers the incest in her own past, a classic producer of mutiple-personality disordered personnae. Of course, there is a great deal more to the dysfunction from which Molly emerges, but to tell it would spoil the enjoyment of watching the pieces come together.
Prior to being injured while jogging by a hit-and-run driver, and ending up in the hospital, and thence in a psychiatric ward, Molly, a grad student in literature had been having an affair with a married lit professor, who apparently collected a grad student each semester. She had taught a summer course in which a student adamantly found evidence of incest in all the classics she read. Ironically, Molly would come to share this view, at least as to James Joyce.
As it happens, Joyce’s grandson, Stephen James Joyce, made a life’s work of guarding his grandfather’s name and reputation. I have a bookmark which quotes Isaac Asimov to the effect that any book worth banning is worth reading. Chris has not achieved quite the stature of a ban, but as she wryly comments on the estate’s warning that she could not quote from Lucia Joyce’s notebooks,” I can’t, but my characters can.”
It took me weeks to get through this novel, and now I am sorry its over. If we go by the dedication, which says that Chris’s wife, Rachel, loved this book long before she married Chris, the book has to have been written either before or during the time that Chris was spending fifteen years in writing the non-fiction I Ain’t Marchin’ Any More, Dissent and Resistance From Valley Forge to Chelsea Manning. I took a whole summer reading that one, so it was no secret to me that Chris could write up a storm. But fiction is something else, and Molly O’Donnell unfolds through these pages as a three-dimensional, if not more, character, her madness only an attribute of the opera-singing, shrink-defying, marathon running human being who comes alive on these pages.
If you’re listening, Amazon, five stars.
March 8, 2023
Walking with Molly O’Donnell as she descends into madness and through it, is the path that Chris Lombardi paves through blue: season. Molly’s own journals and the actions of family, friends and of the fellow inmates of the Jacob Pearlstein Psychiatric Institute provide the details of the journey readers take to glimpse through a cracked window, the tortured world of a brilliant, talented, beautiful woman with secrets.
Secrets and the long-term effects of holding them, pushing them away, revealing them, is one of the themes of blue: season. Lombardi’s skillful use of empathetic language draws the reader into Molly’s world as slowly, slowly, Molly’s madness and the revelation of her secrets overtakes them.
This is a lengthy book with a careful pace, but this is the speed at which mental health is best understood—not hurriedly or all at once—but gradually, as pieces of Molly’s life fall out of, and into, place.
Set in the world of academia, blue: season begins with an unacademic task—training for the New York Marathon. The pressures of pursuing an academic life, the obsession that can overtake a person trying to succeed in that life and the sacrifices that Molly and others make for success, are off-set in Molly’s world by running.
Brilliantly, empathetically, and knowledgably told, blue: season is a frightening but hope-filled story that readers will not soon forget.
Secrets and the long-term effects of holding them, pushing them away, revealing them, is one of the themes of blue: season. Lombardi’s skillful use of empathetic language draws the reader into Molly’s world as slowly, slowly, Molly’s madness and the revelation of her secrets overtakes them.
This is a lengthy book with a careful pace, but this is the speed at which mental health is best understood—not hurriedly or all at once—but gradually, as pieces of Molly’s life fall out of, and into, place.
Set in the world of academia, blue: season begins with an unacademic task—training for the New York Marathon. The pressures of pursuing an academic life, the obsession that can overtake a person trying to succeed in that life and the sacrifices that Molly and others make for success, are off-set in Molly’s world by running.
Brilliantly, empathetically, and knowledgably told, blue: season is a frightening but hope-filled story that readers will not soon forget.
July 2, 2023
‘Blue: season’ is a literary fiction with a complex storyline. The story is set in the 1990s and is about Molly, a musician and graduate student who happens to fall in a psychiatric ward in Baltimore. While you follow Molly and her journey, you notice that she calls herself Lucia, a schizophrenic who happens to have the same symptoms as Molly. Through Molly’s diary entries, we discover what leads to her meltdown, and the more you read, the more you understand Molly’s dysfunctional family, roommates and everything that causes her to end up where she is.
The one thing that tremendously stands out in this book is how it’s written. The literature is rich with notions, elements, and a vigorous way of self-telling and emotional expression. The storytelling hooks you into discovery and wonder.
I appreciated all the attention to detail. The subject discusses mental institutions and other related issues like trauma and things we still find difficult to accept or converse with to this day.
The book cover is well thought out and represents the rich content inside. I recommend it to those who like short reads.
The one thing that tremendously stands out in this book is how it’s written. The literature is rich with notions, elements, and a vigorous way of self-telling and emotional expression. The storytelling hooks you into discovery and wonder.
I appreciated all the attention to detail. The subject discusses mental institutions and other related issues like trauma and things we still find difficult to accept or converse with to this day.
The book cover is well thought out and represents the rich content inside. I recommend it to those who like short reads.
February 13, 2023
This layered and satisfying literary whodunnit is set in Baltimore and Boston in the 1990s. We meet Molly, a graduate student obsessed with James Joyce’s daughter, Lucia. After she is committed to a mental institution we learn, through her diary entries, what led to her breakdown. The characters we meet along the way – Molly’s dysfunctional family; her alt-art roommates; the students and the faculty at her college, including her thesis advisor who is also her married lover; and the inmates and staff at the mental institution -- are all vividly drawn in Lombardi’s empathetic and often sharply humorous prose. Highly recommended.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews