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The Truth About Delilah Blue (2010)

door Tish Cohen

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1125241,265 (3.74)10
Delilah, an aspiring artist and nude model, starts to question her life and father, who has begun to show signs of Alzheimer's disease, after her mother suddenly returns with a young daughter and reveals a shocking family secret.
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    Falling Under door Danielle Younge-Ullman (KatherineOwen)
    KatherineOwen: It has the same kind of literary style and prose with another engaging artistic broken heroine like Falling Under.
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Toon 5 van 5
I was angry with the book. It sounded interesting. I like characters around my age, and she was interested in the arts which I am as well. I loved the title and like stories about complicated mother-daughter relationships so I thought, why not? Well it was nothing short of awful. The characters were uninteresting. The plot, about 10 pages in was totally predictable. The mother was a selfish annoying flake, the father dealing with the beginnings of Alzheimers pissed me off. I just didn't care. The romantic interest for Delilah, god, I pretty much skipped over every page involving that relationship. To be honest, I have never been a romance fan. And Delilah herself? Not that interesting. Not bad, but not interesting. The only character I found myself curious about was her little sister who popped up along with the mother. Even she didn't quite seem like a believable seven year old. To top it all of, the writing wasn't all that great. ( )
  banrions | Dec 7, 2021 |
This book captured and maintained my interest. A bittersweet story of a very dysfunctional family from the point of view of the adult daughter struggling with the emotional weight that results from her childish and selfish parents. The story comes to a mostly satisfying and realistic conclusion. The authoress makes me care about the daughter and hope for the resolution she needs. ( )
  kewaynco | Apr 10, 2016 |
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. ( )
  galleysmith | Sep 4, 2010 |
If you're a regular reader, you may remember me raving about Tish Cohen's book Inside Out Girl. I was thrilled to see she had a new release The Truth About Deliah Blue - and yes I will be raving again!

Delilah Blue moved with her father Victor from Toronto to Los Angeles when she was eight. She has always believed that her mother abandoned her. Victor has always been overprotective, sheltering 'Lila' from anything or anyone he perceives as a possible danger or threat. As a result Lila has become a bit insular. She has always loved art, as did her mother. For financial reasons, she is unable to attend college. She boldly decides to step out of her comfort zone and do nude figure modeling so she can 'attend' the classes.

Victor is not behaving like himself lately though - he seems to be forgetting things, though he struggles valiantly to hang on to his normal routines. He is only 53. In the midst of this....Delilah's mother appears - along with her young daughter Kieran. She tells a very different story than Victor's. Delilah doesn't know who or what to believe.

Wow. Cohen's forté is character development. Victor's struggle to adhere to his regular routine, picking just the right tie, remembering that a special client likes a certain type of donut, but forgetting salient details was heartbreaking. He knows that something is wrong, but doesn't acknowledge the elephant. Flashbacks to the past are part of the memories Victor hangs on to and slowly but surely we learn how father and daughter came to be in L.A. Lila's struggle to step outside of the invisible fences that surround her will have you silently urging her forward. Lila's mother Elisabeth evoked strong feelings in this reader the more we got to know her. Kieran is a moving character as well - having lived with the loss and her mother's memories of Delilah her entire life.

Cohen explores every character's expectation of what is right and what shoud be done. Not all were what I expected, which I appreciated. A great page turner that I truly enjoyed.

Fans of Lori Lansens and Jodi Picoult would enjoy this book. ( )
  Twink | Jul 23, 2010 |
Delilah Blue is a twenty-year old budding artist, so desperate to enter art school that she begins to model nude for art students in an attempt to raise money. She lives with her father, Victor, in a quaint little cabin outside of Los Angeles. They moved to LA when Delilah was eight. Since Delilah, now called Lila, could remember, they lived a pretty secluded life. Her father wouldn’t let her play with other children growing up, and when she got old enough to enter college, refused to let her apply for financial aid. Victor always claimed he was just protecting Lila but it did get to be a bit extreme.

Victor begins to experience moments of memory loss, confusion, and eventually anger. Lila insists that he go to the doctor, but he keeps putting it off. Around the same time a ghost from Lila’s past makes a reappearance: her mother, who allegedly abandoned her when she was younger. Lila must come to terms with her past, including her feelings of abandonment, while dealing with her father’s illness and her future as an artist.

I’ve been a fan of Cohen’s writing since I reviewed her book Inside Out Girl. In The Truth About Delilah Blue, she continues to write about strong, deep characters who must overcome some sort of battle. It may sound a bit cliche but I guarantee it is not. Her prose is detailed, developed, and fluid:

"To have a mother like Elizabeth, and then lose her-not because she was struck by a car or swept out to sea by a dangerous current, but because she wasn’t sufficiently enamored by you to hang around-it left a hole in who you were. You became one of those people who radiated worthlessness. You became a living, breathing, walking–and in Lila’s case, drawing, painting, getting naked–tragedy. "

You can’t help but feel for Lila and all the pain she is forced to endure. Cohen’s skillful writing paints the scene right before your eyes. The scene becomes multi-dimensional, you not only picture the setting and the characters but you can genuinely feel the emotion flowing from the pages.

Writing of Lila’s reuniting with her mother:

"When a child spends a lifetime, or close to it, waiting for one specific moment, something magical and faraway with the power to set her entire world straight, she imagines that someday from up, down, and sideways…But there’s a fact about someday that you can’t possibly understand until it has settled upon you. Someday you’ve doomed the moment you wished it into existence. You’ve already ruined it. By imagining it even once, you’ve created an expectation someday can’t possibly live up to."

It was hard not to like Lila’s character. She was extremely strong-willed and did her best to keep control over the havoc that was attempting to take over her life. The characters of her father and mother were a bit more difficult to like. Her father seemed stubborn and unreliable while her mother was extremely flighty and self-absorbed. My favorite character, other than Lila would have to be Kieran, Lila’s young half-sister. I truly felt for her; she was a child but refused or was unable to behave as one.

I highly recommend reading The Truth About Delilah Blue. For me, it helped me appreciate what I had growing up, the relationship I had with my parents, and my childhood overall. It’s the perfect book club read. In the back of the book, readers can learn more about the author, including a short interview and a list of the author’s favorite female characters in literature. ( )
  jennsbookshelves | Jun 24, 2010 |
Toon 5 van 5
Tish Cohen may never win a Nobel Prize, unless a throng of females with sand in their hair and sunscreen between their toes performs a coup d’état on the committee. But that hardly matters. The Truth About Delilah Blue is still a powerfully good read, perfectly timed for release under the hot rays of summer.
 
After first reading The Truth About Delilah Blue's jacket blurb, it struck me as a beach book. It turned out I was only slightly incorrect; it's an airplane book, most satisfying when you really have nothing else to do and nowhere else to go.
 
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There's a thing that happens to a child who grows up thinking her mother doesn't want her. That child can't help but hold this knowledge like a cavity way at the back of her mouth. It's ugly and tastes bad and convinces her she is unlovable to the core. For who could fall for someone whose own mother can't stick around?
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Delilah, an aspiring artist and nude model, starts to question her life and father, who has begun to show signs of Alzheimer's disease, after her mother suddenly returns with a young daughter and reveals a shocking family secret.

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