A review by babydmarie
Costalegre: A Novel Inspired By Peggy Guggenheim and Her Daughter by Courtney Maum

5.0

Love, love, love this book! I read this in one sitting because I couldn't put it down. The entries in this fictional diary all feel marked by a heady, humid, anticipation, much like the novel's anticipation of the storm to come. Our teenage narrator, Lara, feels authentically adolescent, but never dumbed down or hyper-juvenile. She talks with complex grace about a very genuine desire for love, romantic love, familial love, platonic love. This book is brilliant, dreamy, and packs a punch in a brief package. I also loved the illustrations throughout and the small details of the diary format. While Courtney Maum's books are all wildly different, and this one is her most ambitious yet, they all manage to take complex and dazzling ideas, about art or tech or humanity or love, and pull them into intimately rendered characters.