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Summary
Summary
Growing up in working class Boston in an Italian American family, Anna's childhood was sparse but comfortable. Anna and her sisters are devoted to their mother, and when their father gets a new job outside the city, the family is tossed into a middle-class suburban existence. Anna's mother is suddenly adrift, and the darkness lurking inside her expands. Her daughters, trapped with her in the new house, must do everything they can to keep her from unravelling. A story about sisterhood, the complications of class, and the chains of inheritance between mothers and daughters.
Author Notes
Kayla Maiuri holds an MFA in fiction writing from Columbia University. Born in the Greater Boston area, she now lives in Brooklyn. Mother in the Dark is her first novel.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Maiuri's wrenching and poignant debut centers on a family in escalating crisis due to a mother's mental illness. Anna, 20-something, left her Massachusetts hometown for New York City, where she shares an apartment with her friend Vera. Now, Vera has fallen in love, and Anna is afraid she'll move in with the boyfriend. Distressed, Anna ignores phone calls from her father, Vin, and her two younger sisters, Lia and Sofia, despite sensing the calls are because her mother, Dee, is not well. Most of the action is in flashbacks to Anna's adolescence, when Vin, without consulting Dee, moves the family out of the Italian American suburb in Boston where Dee grew up. They are the first family to move into a new development, where Vin becomes more aloof and drinks too much, and Dee mentally shuts down. The sisters react in different ways, as Anna and Lia become close to Vera, who moves in across the street. Maiuri brings nuance to the heavy subject matter: inherited madness, fracturing family bonds, and resentment held in the body, balanced nicely with Anna's strong narrative voice: "I hate that she's so desperate for love," she says of Vera. Fans of Justin Torres's We the Animals will find a lot to like. Agent: Alice Whitwham, Elyse Cheney Literary. (Aug.)
Kirkus Review
A daughter tells the grim story of the effects of her mother's mental illness. Most of this debut novel takes place during the childhood of its narrator, Anna, with occasional chapters set when she is in her 20s; her mother, Diana, is at the center of the book. When Anna and her two younger sisters, Lia and Sofia, are small, their family lives in the working-class neighborhood near Boston that Diana grew up in and where she has the support of family and friends. But when her husband moves them to a raw new suburb where she knows no one, she spirals into mental illness. The author writes insightfully about a child's perceptions of growing up amid neglect and conflict, and she depicts those conditions vividly. But for long stretches those details take over the story and become repetitious: She puts in every long-unwashed nightgown, every sink full of slimy water and crusty dishes, every meal scrounged by the kids from empty cupboards, every embarrassing public incident, every insult from Diana's lips--but never an attempt on anyone's part to seek help. The girls' father undergoes his own deterioration, drinking heavily. As children, the sisters cling together, but as they become teens they sometimes turn on each other. The one positive constant in young Anna's life is her best friend, Vera. They move to New York and live together while going to college, but even though Anna cuts off contact with her family, the past pushes its way in. For all of the family's members, it seems the truly crushing force is not mental illness itself but the urge to keep it secret. A bleakly effective narrative. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Anna always knew that her mother, Diana, was different, but most mothers in her tiny Italian American Boston neighborhood were. Some cooked, some yelled, some gossiped, but shared heritage smoothed over most things. When Anna's father moves the family to the outskirts of town, Diana deteriorates rapidly. Suffering from what Anna can identify only later as addiction and depression, Diana fails to engage with the world around her, leaving Anna and her two sisters scrabbling for food, education, and attention. Years later, attending college in New York and confronting her own depressive tendencies, Anna receives an urgent phone call from her younger sister and has to decide if she's strong enough to see her mother again. A tender and achingly vulnerable story in the vein of memoirs like Educated and The Glass Castle, Maiuri's debut novel peels back layers of multigenerational trauma in a complicated, dysfunctional family. Maiuri doesn't paint her characters as heroes or villains, instead allowing readers to see the love and pain that seeps through the cracks of a family's broken relationships.
