'I have not thought about my wants in so long that the flood of them makes me light-headed.'

Priscilla “Cilla” is only 43 but feels like life has aged her beyond her years, living with her mother whom is now in rehabilitation at a nursing home. Mother, needy, bitter and resentful, forcing her to placate her demands. Every visit feels like drudgery, reminding her of how stifling her life has become. Since the death of Cilla’s sister, her brother-in-law has lived with their daughter, her niece Hannah in Italy who is acting out, ‘Cilla, please. You will come, won’t you?’ It’s been a year since Hannah lost her mother, surely acting out is noraml, right? Yet if she goes, it would be an escape from the dullness of her life, but the idea of caring for yet another person is the kiss of death. Yet even the thought of ‘babysitting’ her fifteen year old niece is better than dealing with her impossible mother and her demands. It’s been a full year of dealing with her mother’s bottomless grief and ill health. Then there is her longtime boyfriend Guy, who spends his time directing tv series, once her own deceased father’s protégé who hungered after her all those years ago. He is distracted by all those young actresses dripping in dewy youth. How can she possibly shine by comparison when time takes it’s toll on the body? Italy it is!

Hannah is becoming quite the young woman, and with the son of family friends Donato’s attention she beams with youth and joy, infusing Cilla with life. Spending time with the pair feels like a seduction what with all the confidence, the freedom, indulging in the pleasures of Italy. Cilla is meant to be looking out for Hannah, keeping her on the straight and narrow, instead she is the one throwing caution off the cliff. Her adult confidence, and Hollywood ties makes her fascinating in Donato’s eyes.He longs to impress her, he is beautiful, could himself be a celebrity, right? Basking in the days and nights beside them feels erotic, as if she is going through a second awakening by accompanying the pair through their own. If she was a ‘better’ woman, she wouldn’t smudge the lines between moral and immoral, she wouldn’t succumb to the charm of a teenage boy but her body is so hungry, and the chemistry is electric, who would it really hurt if no one ever knows?

The scenery itself begs to be explored, it urges release, to abandon one’s every inhibition. She hasn’t given a thought to her own desires, needs in so long, how can anyone blame her for finally thinking of herself first? She should stop what is happening, but she doesn’t want to deny herself one second of it. “Romans love to have a good time at any age…”, so when in Rome… Why should she ‘behave’, nothing interesting comes of that, being old doesn’t make a person dead, we still long for the thrill of things.

Being around Hannah takes her back to the beginning of her relationship with the much older Guy. When she was ‘no longer a little girl but not yet a woman’, same phase her niece has entered, playing grownup. How easy it is to play at being a sexual creature, emulating womanhood. The carelessness of her own parents in the past, too much freedom for she and her sister,Hannah’s mother, youthful flirtations gone too far. Maybe Cilla isn’t the best choice in caging a teenager’s impulses, especially when in her shoes she didn’t cage her own. Maybe despite being so much older now, she is just as likely to jump into the lion’s mouth.

A woman will be punished for letting herself go, for indulging. Cilla isn’t going to be the dutiful aunt, she is going to taste life while she still can even if it could hurt those she is there to protect. Like so many human beings, despite what we know will follow, we still act on impulses. “How easy it is to ignore the darkness in the distance.” All she has is here and now, to focus on what could come of her ‘reckless abandon’ would be a betrayal, especial to herself. But indulgence and deception always comes at a price, is considered downright criminal when a woman of a certain age misbehaves. It’s an indulgent and shameful novel, as most things we know better than to partake of are and engaging because of it. We know the entire time, this isn’t going to end well.

Publication Date: November 5, 2019

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Lovely feel good story. It was well written and flowed well. Easy to read and hard to put down. Perfect on these summer nights

Set in Rome a wonderful location Italian words mixed in.Characters that kept me involved a very entertaining novel.#netgalley #fsg

DNF at 10%

Maybe readers who aren't Italian—or know very little about Italy—might be able to overlook the clichés and blunders in this novel. In this day and age, it's fairly easy to find out information about other countries. You could just ask on Quora....
The thing is that it is tone deaf: there are the occasional Italian words peppered here and there—I guess to give it a more 'genuine' flavour—but, for the most part, the way these Italian characters speak sounds false.
Jacobs applies English formulas to what the Italian characters are saying, for instance: English speakers would tell someone to mind their language by saying 'Language please!' or something of that sort. In Italy, no one would say 'Linguaggio!' and would likely say something along the lines of 'Fai attenzione a come parli' (which roughly translates to 'watch the way you speak'). My point is that the average Italian would likely translate word for word the Italian way of saying mind your language, and probably wouldn't be aware that in English people would say 'watch your language' or just 'language'. So if you have an Italian character, who isn't all that fluent in English, say in English 'Language!' it will strike Italian speakers as inaccurate. Additionally, I doubt many Italian women would refer to their teenage son's friend as 'mia cucciola' (a not widely used term of endearment that is more suited to small children, especially if they are related to you: ie. an aunty calling her 4-year-old nephew 'cucciolotto').
Why have the American girl—whose lived in Italy for a year or so—refer to her dad as 'Papa' which is not the correct spelling for 'dad' in Italian (dad is 'papà', pope is 'papa').
Another thing that annoyed me is that if the author tries to make her setting authentic by using the full names of certain Italian dishes (usually in italics) but couldn't lookup wherever Italian names? 'Marie' is not an Italian name, 'Maria' is an Italian name. There are a lot of Italian names which are used only in certain regions of Italy, and often you can tell if a person comes from the South or the North of Italy through their name (I doubt there are many men who go by Tonio or Donato in Rome...).
Lastly, what is the point in saying that an Italian woman's English has a 'lilting accent. Like Fellini films, like postwar Italian actresses'. I'm fairly sure that Fellini films are not dubbed, but subbed, so the Italian actresses in those film would not be speaking an accented English, but their own language. And isn't saying that she sounded like an actress in old Italian films a bit of a cheap trick?

A great read for those hot summer days, The Worst Kind of Want follows Cilla on a trip to Rome. In her early forties and escaping from having to care for her deteriorating mother back in America, Cilla travels to Rome to spend time with her brother-in-law, Paul, and teenage niece, Hannah. During the heady summer days Cilla becomes embroiled in the life of Donato, an Italian teenager who has befriended her niece. Things spiral from here to an inevitable and dramatic conclusion.

Cilla's character was particularly well done in my view - a woman confronting her own ageing and her mother's decline in a way which was realistic and relatable but never cliched. On the strength of this I'll be looking to read more by Liska Jacobs.

Jacobs’ The Worst Kind of Want is set against the enchanting and seductive backdrop of Rome. Her vibrant depictions of the city will have readers longing to book a flight.

Protagonist Cilla is a complex character. Following the death of her sister and feeling the personal strain of having served as caretaker for her ailing mother, Cilla travels to Italy to help care for and mentor her teenaged niece Hannah. What follows is a Mrs. Robinson meets How Stella Got her Groove Back series of affairs.

I could not put this book down! The characters were so relatable and Rome was a great backdrop. I loved the incorporation of Italian words and the infusion of culture into the story.

Liska Jacobs second novel is again about a woman on the path of self-destruction and she writes this character well.

Cilla has spent many years of her life grieving the loss of her sister and taking care of her mother. Her longtime boyfriend, nearly 20 years her senior, is pursuing women half her age. Now pushing her mid 40s, she takes a trip to Italy to check up on her teenage niece, Hannah. While there, she gets swept up into an affair with Donato, a 17-year-old Italian boy who Hannah loves.

At a pivotal time in her life where Cilla is confronting a myriad of different things—death, childlessness, her own approaching menopause and the loss of her youth—Donato seems to fill the voids created by these uncomfortable realities.

But of course this fling is no more than a temporary distraction, and as it spirals out of control, Cilla is forced to reckon with the consequences of her actions and finally confront the grief she’s had bottled up all this time.

Though her decisions are obviously questionable, Cilla isn’t an entirely unlikeable character. In the face of the inevitable voids that expand throughout life, it’s sometimes impossible to avoid the allure of recklessness—any brief respite from the pain of reality.

I absolutely loved Liska Jacob’s first novel, Catalina - so I was super excited to receive an advance copy of her upcoming book in exchange for an honest review.

The description: A trip to Italy reignites a woman’s desires to disastrous effect in this dark ode to womanhood, death and sex.

There’s something special about Jacob’s writing. It‘s sinister and a little tense... the characters are complex and though I didn’t necessarily relate to them, I was intrigued. Similar to how she portrayed Catalina in her first novel, Italy acted as more of a character throughout the story than s simple location, and it made me want to book a trip there ASAP.

I will say it irrationally irked me how much she referenced the noise of cicadas as a setting description... no less than 25 times.

But overall - really enjoyed. There were hints of Catalina in this one - good in the sense I could tell they were the same author, but not so much that it felt like reading the same book twice.

I recently finished “The Worst Kind of Want” by Liska Jacobs. The narrator Cillia has traveled to Rome for the summer to take care of her teenage niece, Hannah whose has recently lost her mother.

The atmosphere and mood of the story was excellent. I felt immersed in the sights and smells of Rome.
However, the plot was problematic for me. There seemed to be too many plot threads that weren’t explained and not really relevant.

I adored Jacobs previous book, “Catalina” for the focused plot and beautiful mood.
I still enjoyed “The Worst Kind of Want” but not as much as her previous work.

I received an advance readers copy in exchange for an honest review

I really wanted to like this book. I was intrigued by the idea of a middle-aged divorcee who has been caring for a dying mother getting her life back with a young guy, but this was just too melodramatic for me. 2.5 for the story and an extra star for the writing style, so it’s 3.5 rounded up

Very interesting story of a divorced middle-aged woman spending the summer in Italy with her deceased sister's husband and his teenage daughter, her niece. She has been caring for a sick mother and very tired of the demands made upon her as caretaker. The vacation is supposed to bring her closer to her niece and brother-in-law. Instead, she begins an ill-fated affair with one of the niece's teenaged friends.

As it turns out, the niece is in love with this young man, and much sneaking around on the part of the woman and young man is part and parcel of the plot. However, because of the lush descriptions of the Italian countryside and detailed descriptions of Rome, what would be tedious is made interesting.

A fast and predictible read, yet quite enjoyable, with good character development.

Cilla travels out to Rome to help her brother-in-law with his wayward daughter Hannah. Hannah looks and acts identical to her dead mother. After years of being the good daughter and good sister, Cilla gives into temptation of the worst kind in the hot Rome summer. Cilla is supposed to be mentoring Hannah but in reality she takes her sister's place as the reckless member of the family. This book is dark and sensual and a great read.