categories : Review
Title: The Truth About Delilah Blue
Author: Tish Cohen [website] [twitter]
Genre: Contemporary, Women’s Literature
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Source: Provided by Publisher
Parental Warning: criminal activity, sex, drinking, drugs
“In reality, there was a great deal about her father she didn’t know. That he was an abductor, for one. A man willing to do something most people would never even contemplate. And once he’d succeeded with that, he was perfectly fine with telling his daughter her own mother rejected her and letting her grow up feeling unworthy of any love that wasn’t his love.”
Summary (from the publisher):
Delilah Blue Lovett has always been a bit of an outsider, ever since her father moved her from Toronto to L.A when she was eight, claiming Delilah’s mother no longer artist like her errant mom, Delilah attends art class for free — by modeling nude at the front of the room, a decision that lifts the veil from her once insular world. While she struggles to find her talent, her father, her only real companion, is beginning to exhibit telltale signs of early-onset Alzheimer’s. And her mother, who Delilah always assumed had selfishly abandoned them, is about to reappear with a young daughter in tow…and a secret that will change everything. Delilah no longer knows which parent to trust — the only one she can really rely on is the most broken person of all: herself.
Opinion:
Cohen has created a powerful and compelling novel focussing on the dynamics of a severely dysfunctional family and the impact each of their actions has within the larger whole. Individual characters held tightly to a multitude of personal burdens and shortcomings that demonstrated how the actions of a single person can have long lasting influence on those with whom they have the closest relationships.
Main character, Lila is so perfectly broken, an unknowing child of parental abduction it’s not until later in the story that she really begins to understand why it is she is the way she is. It is at the point where her long lost mother, Elizabeth, appears that Lila comes to the realization that the isolation of her life was less about her father’s fear for her health and well being and more about his fear of being caught for a crime she didn’t know he had committed.
As this all unfolded, it was amazing to watch Lila start to empower herself, to start to come out of her shell. Having not had any true and strong relationships outside of her father the addition of love from both a potential boyfriend and her new younger sister further humanized her and packed an emotional punch. Even small things (like allowing someone to touch her) were grand sweeping moves forward towards overcoming some of her demons. It was an incredible progression to watch.
Lila’s father’s decent into Alzheimer’s was also a compelling portion of the novel. I’ve not known anyone afflicted with the disease so I can’t speak to how quickly a person can progress but it seemed as if one day he was alright the next not so much. It wasn’t breakneck in the way that it made the plot unbelievable but did make me wonder if memory loss and dementia really does move so quickly. I appreciated how well Lila handled the situation and despite her frustration with his avoidance of both the criminal acts of his past and the progression of his illness, she treated her father with a great deal of respect and compassion. I knew without a doubt that while she struggled with his choice to take her away from her mother she still loved him unconditionally.
I’m a girl who doesn’t like too many things happening in a story at once and there were multiple stories happening here. The really great news, however, is that I was able to move past that issue because Cohen wrote each aspect with such clarity and care that the infusion of the separate pieces created a really dynamic whole where the constant fluctuation of cause and effect provided the characters and situations greater depth. I felt bad for Victor not only because he was helpless against Elizabeth’s past manipulations but also because as he was being discovered for his crimes while struggling with the realization that Alzheimer’s was clouding his mind. Then we had Elizabeth finding her long lost daughter and doing her best to inject herself into Lila’s life. A selfish woman in almost every capacity I could see that she genuinely loved Lila but despite that almost everything she did was for her own benefit. Living fast and loose with her own life it was difficult for those around her to adjust their own less flexible morals and values to work in tandem. The further addition of Kieran, Elizabeth’s young daughter, showed the effects of being not only neglected by her mother but living under the shadow of the idealized Lila. That Lila embraced each of them individually and essentially became the mother figure and care taker for them all demonstrated that she’d done well to accept them for who they were while still attempting to better not only their lives but her own in the process.
The greatest strength of this story is in the characterizations. Each person is so different yet in some ways the same. Emotional and burdened with their individual crosses to bear the reader is taken on a journey of self-discovery and, at times, anguish as they grow and change. It is for this reason that a person should read The Truth About Delilah Blue.
[This review is part of a blog tour arranged by TLC Book Tours]
