Costalegre

Starred review from May 6, 2019
Maum’s third novel (after Touch) is a rich and delectable tale of art, love, and war. The narrative, which is based on Peggy Guggenheim and her set, is enlivened by 14-year-old narrator Lara, who elevates the book from juicy gossip to a beautiful meditation. The year is 1937 and Leonora Calaway, a wealthy art collector, has gathered up the artists “the Führer decided were the most degenerate in Europe” and sailed to Costalegre in Mexico, where Surrealists and Dadaists, writers and painters, all live together to wait out the coming war. Her neglected daughter, Lara, always a tag-along on her mother’s globe-hopping adventures and the only child to be found in Costalegre, writes in her diary that she’s “burning up inside to have someone just for me.” As the Mexican heat and the lack of news take their toll, a new figure, Dadaist sculptor Jack Klinger, arrives, charming everyone, especially Lara, who feels, like the artists, drawn to him. The highlight is Lara, whose searching intelligence and insightful observations anchor the story. This is a fascinating, lively, and exquisitely crafted novel.

Starred review from May 1, 2019
A young girl follows her mother and a wayward group of artists into the Mexican jungle on the eve of World War II in this spare, enchanting novel. Fourteen-year-old Lara Calaway just wants her mother to notice her. Instead, Leonora, a wealthy New York socialite, is more interested in collecting members of the avant-garde. There's Konrad, a traumatized painter, whom Leonora marries; C., Konrad's longtime lover, a forceful and dedicated writer with hair that "floats around her face like an evil halo"; and the loathed Hetty, "the only other woman with us in Mexico...[who] is just horrible." Maum (Touch, 2017, etc.) depicts Lara's curiosity and longing in exquisite, diary-style vignettes, sketches, notes, and unsent letters. "He'd be so beautiful if he were happy," she muses about Konrad, her new stepfather. "Sometimes at the parties when I catch the way he is with C., I hate my mother for the way she has to have the things that everybody likes." According to Maum, Leonora and Lara Calaway are based loosely on Peggy Guggenheim and her daughter Pegeen while the artists who make up "the entire bin of loons" at Costalegre are composites of surrealists like André Breton, Leonora Carrington, and Djuna Barnes. Lara makes for a fine narrator--young enough to be both enchanted and annoyed by the strange collection of adults that surround her and old enough to explain her frustrations with heartbreaking clarity. Only occasionally does Maum allow her teenager to really sound like a teenager, and then it's played for laughs. "If she ends up putting her museum here," Lara writes of Costalegre and her mother, "I am going to die." Occasional theatrics aside, Lara blooms when she encounters a Dadaist sculptor from Germany, moved by his work and his ability to really see her, "you know, in that way that feels like something has been thrown directly toward you, as if you're on the other end of a straight line." The novel closes as quickly as it opens, in a moment of teenage confusion, rage, and hope. A lush chronicle of wealth, art, adventure, loneliness, love, and folly told by a narrator you won't be able to forget.

COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

June 1, 2019

It's 1937, Hitler is in power, and American heiress Leonora Calaway is stockpiling so-called degenerate artworks to keep them safe and transporting both them and a group of surrealist friends to Costalegre, the luxuriant Mexican paradise she calls home. She has taken along her teenage daughter, Lara, who narrates the story, offering an intimate look into the art world and the complicated and precarious relationships among the people her mother has gathered. Lara keeps a diary, illustrated with a few of her sketches, exploring her own amorous feelings and describing her frustration with trying to get her mother's attention. By the end, Lara realizes that although these surrealists believe that passion and nightmares are important, "they don't value simplicity, which is how I think of love." VERDICT Inspired by Peggy Guggenheim and her daughter, Pegeen, this mother-daughter dysfunctional relationship is beautifully explored by Maum (Touch) in a soul-searching, atmospheric novel set in a hot, humid climate as torrid as the affairs of the characters who inhabit it.--Lisa Rohrbaugh, Leetonia Community P.L., OH

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2019
Lara is a captive of her mother's zeal to save artists and their works condemned by the Nazis. It's 1937, and willful heiress Leonora Calaway has brought a group of surrealists to a Mexican jungle resort. Lonely, worried, and funny 15-year-old Lara fills her diary with preternaturally keen observations of the adults' competitive combativeness and nature's glory and perils. Ever-inventive Maum follows the New York hipness of Touch (2017) with a dreamlike fable about a would-be idyll poisoned by ego, war, and the guilt of the rescued. Leonora is based on art collector Peggy Guggenheim, Lara on Guggenheim's daughter, Pegeen, and discerning the real-life inspirations for the artists is part of this evocative tale's allure. But its depth is found in how astutely Maum tracks her diarist-narrator's intellectual and emotional coming-of-age through her evolving eloquence and sharpening perceptions. Wounded by her mother's inattention, infatuated with a sculptor, burdened by her femaleness, and increasingly serious about making art, Lara is extraordinarily poignant. By internalizing and then transcending her sources, Maum has created a brilliantly arch and haunting novel of privilege and deprivation.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)