"Delightful ... In Lara, Maum has given a little-considered daughter a more hopeful future." ―Mona Simpson, The New York Times Book Review
"Maum's slender, intelligent Costalegre is about many things: art as spectacle and art as discipline; life as joke and life as tragedy; the role of unreason in paintings and politics. But most of all, it's about the youthful desire to be, in Lara's words, contemplated and considered ― to be, in short, loved." ―The Boston Globe
One of Glamour's Best Books of the Decade and a Best Book of Summer at AM New York, Moda Operandi, GOOP, Publishers Weekly, TIME, Southern Living, and Thrillist.
It is 1937, and Europe is on the brink of war. Hitler is circulating a most-wanted list of "cultural degenerates"-artists, writers, and thinkers whose work is deemed antithetical to the new regime. To prevent the destruction of her favorite art (and artists), the impetuous American heiress and modern art collector Leonora Calaway begins chartering boats and planes for an elite group of surrealists to Costalegre, a mysterious resort in the Mexican jungle.
The story of what happens to these artists when they reach their destination is told from the point of view of Lara, Leonora's neglected fifteen-year-old daughter. Forced from a young age to live with her mother's eccentric whims, tortured lovers, and entourage of gold-diggers, Lara suffers from emotional, educational, and geographical instability that a Mexican sojourn with surrealists isn't going to help. But when she meets the outcast Dadaist sculptor Jack Klinger, Lara thinks she might have found the understanding she so badly craves.
Heartbreaking and strange, Costalegre is inspired by the real-life relationship between the heiress Peggy Guggenheim and her daughter, Pegeen. Courtney Maum triumphs with this wildly imaginative and curiously touching story of a privileged teenager who has everything a girl could wish for-except a mother who loves her back. Delightful . . . In Lara, Maum has given a little-considered daughter a more hopeful future.-Mona Simpson, The New York Times Book Review
Maum's slender, intelligent Costalegre is about many things: art as spectacle and art as discipline; life as joke and life as tragedy; the role of unreason in paintings and politics. But most of all, it's about the youthful desire to be, in Lara's words, contemplated and considered?to be, in short, loved.
-The Boston Globe
A lush chronicle of wealth, art, adventure, loneliness, love, and folly toldby a narrator you won't be able to forget.-Kirkus, Starred Review
If anything can be taut and lush at once, Maum's novel fits the bill.-Washington Post
This
is a fascinating, lively, and exquisitely crafted novel.-Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
A brilliantly arch and haunting novel of privilege and deprivation.-Booklist
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.
-Library Journal
An arty, lavish novel, Costalegre examines one of the relationships that is often the most surreal to dissect: the one between mother and daughter.
-Thrillist
Maum's coming-of-age novel among some of Europe's elite is heartbreaking in its evocation of a teenage girl whose mother collects artists to save but who ignores the daughter struggling not to drown. Maum captures the language and the intense flux of adolescent lability. She does it so well that readers may feel they've intruded on something private.-The Star-Tribune
With both humor and criticality, Maum's coming-of-age novel probes the hypocrisy of the art world, the challenges of being a child of artists, and the dangers of not being loved.-Ploughshares
When young Lara finds herself in Costalegre, living with her mother and a gaggle of 19th century surrealist artists, w
