There are three things I love most
in a book, and Courtney Maum’s “Costalegre” hits them all. To start, it’s an
epistolary novel, written in diary format. I find the letter writing format
challenging as a writer, but delightfully intimate as a reader. It’s difficult
to be both in a character’s head (in this case a teenage girl) and to move the
story forward. Maum is talented enough to do just that.
“Costalegre” is full of wonder and loneliness,
told from the point of view of rich socialite Leonora’s daughter, Lara, who
wants nothing more than to be seen. It is in many ways a coming-of-age novel,
but it is so much more than that.
It’s also historical fiction, which
is my favorite kind of fiction. “Costalegre” is based on the life of Peggy
Guggenheim and her daughter, Pegeen. The year is 1937, and the fictional Leonora
Callaway loads up a boat full of artists and artwork and flees to Mexico in
order to avoid Hitler. They are safe, but they are trapped, too, both by their
feelings of survivor guilt and by their actual location. They can’t leave
Leonora’s compound unless they want to risk death in the jungle, which some of
them do.
My third favorite thing in a novel
is anything set in the jungle. “Costalegre” put me in mind of Anne
Patchett’s “State of Wonder” and Lily King’s “Euphoria”. The setting is both
lush and dangerous, opulent and terrible. I love when books create a physical
world that I can nearly touch and hear and smell—not just “see.”
Maum, whose previous novels include
“I Am Having So Much Fun Here without You” and “Touch”, are worth reading if
you haven’t already.
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