Domestic thrillers about new moms are a new favorite subgenre of mine. However, this one fell a bit flat. I think I struggled to get into it which made it a bit hard for me to really enjoy.

I initially received an ARC of The Upstairs House and I was very excited to read it, because anybody who knows me knows that What Should Be Wild REMAINS one of my go-to recommendations for everybody - I think it is close to a perfect book.

Unfortunately, The Upstairs House came into my life at exactly the wrong time early last year. While I was yearning to be a mother, my younger sister was about to give birth. I am thrilled for her, I love her and my niece, but it was a difficult period for me emotionally. I am, besides somebody who still very much feels the emptiness of the not-yet-a-mother position, the abandoned daughter of a mother with mental health issues, a victim in some ways, somebody with a victim complex in others, who chose to reject motherhood and maternal instincts regardless of what that might mean for her daughters. I set the book down. The ARC expired. My niece was born. My mother stopped talking to my sister after briefly loving her granddaughter, and to her own mother.

I pre-ordered the book. I was coming to it now, still yearning, reckoning more and more with the fear that bad mothering can be a genetic thing. What if it was not just her, what if it was not that we were unloveable, but that it was a thing that she had left me with, that my own children would be reckoning with these feelings thirty years from now, should I be lucky enough to have them?

The Upstairs House feels like it takes the stories of girls like me, girls who watched their mothers fall apart under the weight of motherhood, who became something like mothers themselves to those mothers in some ways, takes their feelings of abandonment, their fears about their own motherhood or potential motherhood, and reckons with them, turning them into horror and love and a grotesque imagining of how both of those things can exist alongside each other. Julia Fine is a master wordsmith, her language incredibly evocative because she chooses the perfect moment, the perfect scene, to include in a single sentence a word that scintillates and turns the entire passage to gold. Her writing is immediate and thoughtful, both demanding so much of you emotionally while allowing you to move through entire pages with ease before tempting you to shift your thinking again to the logical part of your brain rather than with the flood of emotions she built up through the previous scene. They are like commas, allowing you to breathe and try to find your bearing, come to grips with what you've been presented with, before plunging you down into the bathtub with both hands again.

Julia's Megan is both frustrating, frustrated, and somebody to whom it is easy to become devoted. You want to protect her from her sister's insensitivity, her mother's narcissism, her father's indifference, her husband's benign cluelessness. You can feel the injustice of it even as you want to shake her for her foolishness. It is a scathing, elegant commentary on the solitude of early motherhood, of the way that society expects far too much, and yet also too little of new mothers. It lays bare the lack of support while criticizing the systems that force mothers into a motherhood bereft of any of their former self, systems that excoriate mothers for trying to hang on to any of that former self if it does not explicitly benefit the baby. The framing of the story, the pairing of despairing dissertation work, early post-partum wilderness, and the phantom love affair of two women deceased sixty years ago leaves the reader indignant, moved, and ultimately beguiled. There is no choice but to love, deeply, the three women wronged in different ways, violent and vicious in different ways.

The ending, in particular, made me feel anxious, moved me, laid bare the empty not-yet-a-mother, not-anymore-a-mothered-daughter feelings that have sat heavily with me for the last six or seven years, made worse as so many others around me navigate motherhood, navigate daughterhood with a mother who has a new and precious milestone to once again mother through (how do we learn to mother if not from our own mothers?), and ultimately made me feel less alone in those circumstances, in the fears that accompany them, and in the whisper of hope that not being alone in it might, somehow, solve it if only it's possible to find a way to commune about them with others honestly. I wish Megan had not let that bird fly from her hand, but it's selfish of me to feel that way.

I was expecting this to be more of a thriller, but I still really enjoyed it even after I realized I was wrong! The representation of postpartum depression and new motherhood was striking, and the writing was beautiful.

I FELT this book. The emotions were so visceral and the writing was real and even quotable at times. I loved how diverse the story was in a sense of how many different topics or situations were brought in. I had a great time with this one!

This book was not quite what was expected with the synopsis. I felt it was more of a 'biographical" story than a thrilleresque story. There was a lot of information within the pages on postpartum depression and Margaret, but I felt their needed to be more of a back thriller page turner.

This book had an interesting premise but it failed to deliver. Maybe it's just me but I have read to many books recently about post partum depression and I feel burnt out from it. I liked the fantastical parts of this book but it didn't capture my attention.

So creepy and wonderful and Goodnight Moon will never be the same. I love Julia Fine and will read anything she writes.

This book is great! Would definitely recommend. Thanks so much to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

3.75. I can definitely say that I’ve never read anything else like The Upstairs House. I think the way that postpartum depression was represented was truly beautiful, and I loved being in Megan’s head even when things got incredibly dark. I think the frayed boundaries of reality worked so well for this book, and I’m glad that there was never a moment of true “explanation.”

I knew next to nothing about Margaret Wise Brown and Michael Strange before going into this book, and I especially didn’t realize that they had a sapphic relationship. I loved that we had a glimpse into the darker side of a queer relationship in the 50s, and how toxicity can bloom regardless of gender.

This is a truly unique story, and I think it needs the right reader. But when it hits, it’s absolutely stunning!

I read this book months ago and I’m still thinking about it. Yes, there’s a whole lot relevant to my particular interests (postpartum mom, haunting, literary intrigue, Chicago setting...) but it’s also just a good read. Strange and well-crafted and atmospheric.

Margaret Wise Brown may not be a household name, but her book Goodnight Moon, published in 1947, is one of the most popular children’s books of all time. In weird and wonderful ways, that book and its author form the foundation (pun very much intended) of The Upstairs House. This is not a historical novel in the strict sense of the term: most of the novel is set in 2017 and focuses on Megan, an academic and new mother haunted by her unfinished dissertation, which is about modernism and children’s literature. She is also haunted by Margaret Wise Brown, a minor figure in her dissertation. Feeling ambivalent about motherhood and misunderstood by her loved ones, Megan finds a turquoise door in the stairwell of her condo building that leads to Margaret in 1941. Eventually she also meets Michael Strange, Margaret’s real-life female lover, an aggressive presence who demands that Megan modify her dissertation by writing about her. Complicating matters further, Megan can’t predict when she’ll encounter Margaret and Michael: they appear freely in different places in Megan’s world. Wondering if these women from the 1940s are really there or the manifestation of postpartum psychosis, Megan alternates between ignoring them and taking their advice, sometimes too literally.

Megan’s anxieties about motherhood and her dissertation combine to form a many-layered, deep exploration of what it means to be a mother, a daughter, and a woman. The story takes the reader to some strange places: moments of pure gothic terror mix with others that made me laugh out loud as I recognized truths about my own identity as a woman. Witty, dark, and unflinchingly honest, this is a gem of a novel that defies genre.

Sometimes the etymology lessons got a little annoying, but I liked reading this book. Looking forward to this author’s other works.

Wow...this book was weird. And for me, it was weird in a bad way. I will say I appreciated the author tackling post-partum depression, but this was just not my cup of tea. I switched between the audiobook and the digital copy and I found both to be equally confusing. Maybe the whole thing just went over my head. I'm not sure. But definitely not my type of book like I thought it would be.

Listen to my interview and read the show notes:
https://www.writersvoice.net/2021/04/the-upstairs-house-lisa-scottoline-eternal/

I gave this book only 3 stars because while I was fascinated with how Megan's postpartum psychosis developed, I found that the factual aspects of the parallel story of Margaret and Michael interrupted the story too often. Telling the story from Megan's point of view allows the reader to feel her psychotic delusions, although it is clear from the beginning that these are delusions and not caused by anything more sinister. Still, it is an enjoyable if not predictable story.

An academic struggles to maintain a grip on her aspirations and her sanity while battling post-partum depression and an unexplainable haunting. Exploring the minefield of post-partum depression is great material for a horror novel, but this book doesn't do much in the way of terror or crafting an actually frightening tone. The novel, like its protagonists, is routinely side-tracked by Margate Wise Brown. The enigmatic children's author is a major character in the text, taken out of time and beyond the grave to occupy a room that should not exist in the protagonist's apartment complex. Personally, I found the focus on Brown lessened my interest in the novel. I would've much preferred a straight-forward exploration of the struggles of motherhood and mental illness, but that's simply not the story Julia Fine was out to tell. In its aim to do so much, I find the novel seldom executed any one thing in a focused, clear, and entirely effective way: both the Brown narrative and the post-partum narrative felt muddled and the latter was especially predictable. Nonetheless, this book may be a great read for those who are interested in the hidden lives of closeted authors and the profound grief and discomfort of new motherhood.

I loved this book so much!! Such an original story that made me rethink what it means to be a parent today.

Thank you for the opportunity to read this book. Since, I was not able to connect with the characters, I did not finish the story and won't be leaving a full review.

There's a lot going on in this book, and I kept bracing myself for it to become gimmicky. But Fine does an impressive job juggling multiple narrative elements without dropping a single one. While one of these is postpartum mental health, I also appreciated that the entirety of the book isn't devoted to questioning the narrator's sanity, as that would have made for a tedious read. Instead, after establishing the narrator's precarious mental state, Fine commits fully to the haunting, which is quite chilling. Unlike hauntings by traditional ghosts with clear motivations, this haunting follows more of a dream logic, which makes sense contextually. At one point toward the end, though, Fine attempts to tie things up a little too neatly, suggesting a dichotomy between Margaret Wise Brown and Michael Strange that isn't fully realized. Overall, though, the book picks up pace and energy in the last quarter, which is refreshing after so many contemporary novels that lose momentum here. [cross-posted to GoodReads]

This book was strange, and I loved it, but I know it won't be for everyone.

So, here's a short summary: Margaret Wise Brown (author of children's book Goodnight Moon) is a ghost haunting the condo of Megan, who just had a baby. She says she is building her house for Michael (Brown's former lover who is also long dead). And really that is all I will say without giving anything away.

I read Fine's first book a few years ago and I liked it a lot so I was excited to see she had another one coming out. This book takes a deep dive into motherhood, PPD, and postpartum psychosis and I do think it will probably appeal to parent's but it's also an intriguing mystery/suspense with a fun literary element.

For me, this was a deep and emotional read as well as a gripping ghost story that kept me turning the pages. Coincidentally I read a lot of it while feeding and rocking my own baby and a lot of the postpartum feelings Megan had really hit home for me.