Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
"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.
Synopsis
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.
Inspired by the real-life relationship between the heiress Peggy Guggenheim and her daughter, Pegeen, Costalegre is the tender and touching story of a privileged teenager who has everything a girl could wish for, except a mother who loves her back.
Synopsis
It is 1937, and Europe is on the brink of war. Hitler is circulating a most-wanted list of artists, writers, and thinkers whose work is deemed a threat to the new regime. To prevent the destruction of her favorite art (and artists), American heiress and modern art collector Leonora Calaway begins swiftly chartering boats and planes for an elite group of surrealists to Costalegre, a mysterious resort in the Mexican jungle, where she has a home.
The story of what happens to these artists is told by Lara, Leonora's neglected fifteen-year-old daughter, who has been pulled out of school to follow her mother to Mexico. "I am destined," Lara writes, "for a destiny I haven't had the chance to meet." Inspired by the beautiful and talented Charlotte, alongside an eccentric menagerie of other surrealists, Lara begins to discover herself as an artist. In days filled with writing, dreaming, horseback riding, and exploring her new home, she grapples with her own ambition, hoping to find a sensitive ear in her mother but often finding herself alone. It's not till she meets the outcast sculptor Jack Klinger, a much older man who has already been living in Costalegre for some time, that Lara thinks she might have found the understanding she so badly craves.