Sofia takes her invalid mother to Spain to consult a local specialist who may be able to diagnose her mother's mysterious ailments. While there Sofia encounters Ingrid, an ex-pat German, and begins a fraught relationship with this enigmatic stranger.

I could not get into this book at all. It's a litany of various relationships Sofia has with women, men, the doctor, the nurse, her mother, her father and her step-mother, with continual false starts. Just as you think Levy is about to take Sofia somewhere, somebody walks into the scene, distracts matters, the plot is derailed and the reader left dangling again. Levy forces the issue at the end and opts for a melodramatic finish, but there is still so much left unresolved that the reader can only be left unsatisfied.
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At the times the book felt overwritten and ungrounded, but it's essentially about a failure-to-launch woman who spends much of her life taking care of her mother who has this mysterious ailment that feels very psychosomatic. They go off to see this doctor who may or may not be a charlatan, and the daughter, our main character, Sofia starts to get her own life. She has a romance with a woman, she goes back to visit the father who abandoned her, and she comes back to deal with her mother once and for all. The mystery of the disease is what really carried me through on this story and once Sofia went to visit her father, I was all in and the pace picked up quite nicely. The twisty, uncertain ending was fun and gave this book a lot of reread potential for me. ( )

4.5 stars ( )

This review is going to be the most biased review ever. Loved.this.book.

Some caveats. This book totally spoke to me because it was about a young woman, Sofia, who is the child of divorced parents. Her father has moved back to his home country of Greece and remarried a much younger woman. Sofia is left to deal with her mother, Rose, who acts like an invalid, insisting she cannot walk.

In a last gasp attempt to find someone who can heal Sofia's mother, Rose, the pair head to Spain where Rose becomes a patient of Dr. Gomez. Sofia's life takes a new turn in Spain, and Dr. Gomez's clinic ends up impacting Sofia as much as it does Rose.

As a child of divorce myself, whose father moved far away and also remarried a much younger woman, this book spoke to me on so many levels. Sofia struggles to gain control of her own life, to create separation from her parents, to find her own identity. She behaves in ways that to me are so understandable, but to other readers may seem unwise or at least emotionally risky. Sofia's whole being is compromised by her parents, and this book reveals her character and her struggles in a very slow way, almost like a smoldering volcano that you know is going to erupt, but will it be in an explosion, or it will be simply ooze the hot lava over the top scalding everything in its way?

It's easy for me to imagine readers who won't like this book . . .most men, people who don't like symbolism, people who need to love the characters, etc. But, it's a shame because I thought this was original and masterful.



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I love Levy's living autobiography, of which three installments have been published: [Things I Don't Want to Know], [The Cost of Living], and [Real Estate]. The first one started out as a response to George Orwell's essay [Why I Write]. Anyway, she kept going, and each installment is worth the read. She is a fascinating person, so very different from myself, and I like the way she thinks about things. Reading this one, I noted she puts a lot of herself into her this book. I liked it, but I can see why it wouldn't work for everyone. It's hard to describe this one - like a screwball comedy but without the comedy. The setting is Spain, and I do feel like I have been to the beaches of Spain, so she does a good job with establishing sense of place. I also thought she did an excellent job of conveying the friction laden landscape of an adult mother/daughter relationship where the daughter is caring for her mother, and the mother is not making it easy. ( )