This Too Shall Pass

May 23, 2016
This short, poignant work balances humor, intimacy, and loss in a way that captures the nuances of each, and manages to be light while staying true to its heroine's grief. Blanca is still reeling after the death of her mother. Approaching middle age, she's also struggling to take measure of her life. She leans on her friends, her married lover, and the fathers of her two children during a summer trip to Cadaques in northeast Spain; Cadaques is where she spent her childhood and she still thinks of it as her and her mother's home. But as the heat and close proximity to her past make insecurities stand out, Blanca is faced with the question of what she truly wants in life. Blanca's crisis feels authentic, due in large part to Busquets' stream-of-consciousness style, which breaks through some of the armor her main character clearly wears with other people. At times the plot can feel meandering, but the steady pacing gives Blanca space to work through her many emotions without unnecessary drama. Rather than infuse the story with heated exchanges, Busquets relies on her main character's rich interior life and longtime relationships to add depth and significance. The easy, sensual way Blanca relates to those around her is thoroughly enjoyable without feeling at odds with the grief she experiences in frequent bursts as she moves through the town her mother loved. Guilt, lust, love, and anger rise to the surface throughout the novel, creating a movingly human portrait of mid-adulthood.

March 15, 2016
A witty and passionate woman, recently bereaved, goes to the beach. "It's my mother's funeral, and if that's not bad enough, I'm forty," says Blanca in the opening paragraph of Busquets' summery, sexy, cool debut novel, set in the author's native Spain. "I swear I've never dressed so badly in my entire life." A couple of pages later, lying in bed with one of her exes, she decides to go recover at the house she's inherited in the coastal town of Cadaques, a place she's been visiting since she was a girl. "The red earth of Tara, I'll go home to Tara," she deadpans, then wonders if she's mixed up ET and Gone with the Wind. Still trying to cure death with sex, she next meets up with her married lover. She's tried and failed to make her body a temple, she explains; it "always remains an amusement park." And then it's off to Cadaques, with two ex-husbands, the young sons she's had with each of them, her best friends, Elisa and Sofia, Elisa's boyfriend, Sofia's son, and Ursula the babysitter. On the way, they stop for lunch at a friend's dog rescue and marijuana ranch. The tumble of kookiness and hedonism is balanced by two remarkable calming elements. One, a summer rain of axioms and insights: "Hope is the hardest facial expression to fake and the ability to express it diminishes with every broken dream; the only thing that can substitute the loss is ordinary desire." Two, a series of brief, emotional cutaways addressing her mother: "When your death was still something inconceivable to me, and still is now, we were at your house chatting. Suddenly, out of nowhere, you stood up to get something from the bathroom and said, without even glancing over at me and as nonchalantly as someone saying, "I need some toothpaste," that "it's been an honor to know you." Oof. Light, profound, sensual, unmistakably European: this may be the only book about grief to feel like a vacation.

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April 15, 2016
Forty-year-old Blanca is crushed by the death of her mother, whom she describes as the person she loved most in life. A little more than a month after the funeral, Blanca leaves Barcelona to spend the summer at her mother's house in the coastal town of Cadaques, with two sons (by two different husbands), two best friends, Elisa and Sofia, and babysitter in tow. An idyll of sun, sea, sex, and frequent infusions of alcohol and dope ensues, punctuated by overlapping visits from both ex-husbands as well as trysts with lover Santi, who is in town with his wife. But the summer's many pleasures can't erase grief, and the house is full of memories that help fuel Blanca's musings on love, marriage, motherhood, aging, death, and loss. Witty and playful in tone as well as poignant and reflective, Busquets' novel is drawn in part from the loss of her own mother, a prominent publishing figure in Spain. The seductions of its setting add to its appeal for American readers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

April 15, 2016

For Blanca, the unthinkable has happened: her grand, demanding, not always loving mother has died, and Blanca doesn't know what she will do without her. But as she declares, "The only thing that momentarily alleviates the sting of death--and life--without leaving a hangover is sex." And as she's leaving Barcelona for her mother's coastal home in Cadaques, bringing along both ex-husbands, eager Oscar and cagier Guillem, plus her two sons and assorted friends, while knowing full well that married lover Santi will also be there, one can expect that her sex life (or at least her longing) will be intense. Even the entrancing stranger Blanca spotted at her mother's funeral shows up to tickle her fancy. This isn't how everyone mourns, but it seems to work for Blanca, who meditates sharply and soulfully on her difficult relationship with her mother and the challenges of life, love, and parenting. Daughter of formidable Spanish publisher Esther Busquets, whose death inspired this book, Busquets nicely captures the competing forces of needing to grieve and wanting to live, creating a distinctive portrait of one woman's loss. VERDICT Entrancing if not deep, and many readers will appreciate Blanca's insights; the translation is creamy smooth. [See Prepub Alert, 11/16/15.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2015

Busquets's mother, Esther Busquets, was a distinguished novelist who for 40 years directed Lumen, an independent publishing house owned by her family. In this autobiographical novel, Blanca mourns her mother's death by abandoning Barcelona for her mother's former home in Cadaques. A No. 1 best seller in Spain that has already sold to 30 countries.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.