Appreciative to NetGalley for a copy of this book. I have read other books by this author so was excited to see this new one available. I'm a fan of a family story - the family dynamics held my interest but at times were a little complex and slow.

Berne (The Dogs of Littlefield) offers an engrossing story of family secrets involving a woman’s estranged mother and her troubled son. Lorna is a successful therapist in Massachusetts whose husband has moved to Seattle and is living with his much younger research assistant. Lorna’s son, Adam, has recently returned from college, and she senses something terrible happened to him there, but he refuses to speak to her and instead spends his time watching YouTube videos.

[read the rest of the review in Publisher's Weekly.]

This is a deeply moving book about secrets and what it costs people to share them. When I first picked up the book, I thought the mother/therapist would be the character I identified with the most. But the son, Adam, is in so much pain that his emotions carry the book through. While I was originally drawn into the story about the Holocaust survivor, every character is compelling in their own way.

Adam is home from college and his mother, Lorna, is having a hard time figuring him out. He’s withdrawn and she can only assume that something happened but how does she get him to talk about his feelings. This is especially frustrating for her as she’s a therapist. She should have all the tools to get him engaged but she’s at a loss.

When Lorna finds out that her mom, Marika, has hurt her ankle and needs assistance she thinks this will be the perfect opportunity to get Adam out of the house and away from his troubles. As they drive to rural Vermont and amidst nature, she is certain that this will allow him to open up and they can find a solution to what is troubling him. Lorna also hopes that finally she will be able to connect with her mother.

Marika disappeared from Lorna’s life when she was a little girl only to reappear many years later and without much of an explanation. Lorna does her best every year, inviting her mother to Thanksgiving but she wants to hear from Marika that she’s needs help and why she left. Unfortunately their reunion is not what Lorna expected but in it’s own way Lorna learns more about herself.

Through some brief flashbacks, Marika’s own childhood in Amsterdam during WWII is revealed and from that we can rationalize some of her behavior but ultimately we are left with a lot of questions. I think the opening chapter was a bit of a struggle but I’m glad I kept reading because overall there were elements I really liked. For example, I really appreciated how Adam and Marika are able to come together and form a stronger bond. It’s interesting how they were able to help one another without Lorna so in some ways it did make me feel sorry for what she’s missing out on.

As I turned the last page I still felt like there were still a lot of questions unanswered so that’s why it did not end up as a favorite read but I will say I thought about this one quite a bit after I finished it. If you enjoy stories about family dynamics and relationships then I would encourage you to check this one out.

You know Lorna, one of the three main characters in Suzanne Berne’s novel The Blue Window. Or you know someone like her. Or you are her. She’s a mother, wife, beleaguered daughter, a put-together suburban professional, whose holding it all together by clutching the pieces so tightly, you know something’s going to shatter in her clenched fist.

It’s not just the overly-controlling-woman trope. It’s the woman who serves, who throws herself into the problems of others so she can ignore her own issues. It makes her a good person – if not slightly annoying. Someone who is valued and needed by others but is completely disconnected from her own needs.

Yes, Lorna is a type. And as with most types, there’s reasons why they behave as they do. Reasons that are often hidden from others. The Blue Window, pivots around several such secrets.

Lorna is a therapist, though it doesn’t seem like she’s particularly good at it. But maybe all therapists have to wear a mask – a “listening look,” as Lorna calls it – so they can drift off as patients rattle on. Her husband is living on the others side of the country. He left originally for the opportunity to run his own lab in Seattle and Lorna wasn’t heartbroken to see him go. Now he’s got a girlfriend. Their son Adam has suddenly returned home from college having experienced some kind of trauma that he refuses to talk about. In fact, he refuses to talk much at all and deep in his humiliation has rejected using the first-person pronoun and all proper names. His pain and attempt at self-erasure are obvious to his therapist-mom but she works hard not to risk pushing him away by being too intrusive. Though eventually it becomes obvious that intrusive is not something Lorna would ever do. She’s more controlling than intrusive. But really, isn’t controlling the same thing, only with more manners?

Lorna’s mother Marika, the final character in this trio, abandoned her family when her children were small. She resurfaced almost 30 years later with an address on a postcard. The relationship between the two women hasn’t been easy. Mostly it’s Marika being a surly hermit who can be cuttingly mean and Lorna trying to please her at the annual Thanksgiving dinner Lorna hosts. Why Marika left isn’t clear but she’s also living with a secret that could explain a lot.

Each of these characters is hiding, mostly from themselves. Lorna seems to be the one who’s put together, who manages all the details, who’ll be there to support whoever needs her. And even though it’s her mother Marika who has the most interesting story, it’s Lorna who’s at the center. But she fails to hold us. The deep flaws in her character are set up in scenes she remembers from her past. It’s not just abandonment that has shaped Lorna. She’s also been subjected to the damaging cultural expectations forced on most young women in this society.

“After several failed romances, Lorna had worried if she was somehow unqualified for marriage. Young women felt differently now, thank god, but she’s grown up believing (while pretending otherwise) that not being married by your late thirties denoted a failure of character as well as of attractiveness, and worse, some sort of fundamental lack of warmth.”

These expectations often aren’t seen or understood by women. The fish can’t see the water they’re swimming in. But usually by the time women reach Lorna’s age it becomes obvious – or there are at least some inklings – how influenced some of our thinking and decisions may have been. Lorna shown no signs of that. Her lack of even an attempt at self-understanding adds a disturbing tone to some of her memories.

In a scene at the hospital room where her brother, Wade, was dying of AIDS, he wants to reminisce about the time spent together as children.

“On that cool March evening in San Francisco, their last evening together, in his darkened hospital room overlooking a fountain, what she should have done was let Wade talk. But she could not bear to listen. And so out of pity and cowardice and delicacy and dread, she’d changed the subject.”

That just feels cold.

Lorna is just too ambiguous for someone so central to the story. She has no life outside her roles as mother, daughter, and wife. She’s dull. Surely the overburdening of herself is meant to be a reaction to some lack in her life, the control a cover up for the chaos she can’t manage. But when there should be pain and struggle, there’s…nothing.

“It had not broken her heart when Roger left. But she had loved him. She loved their son. During the years they all lived together, she’d thought about and wondered about them every day, driving home from her office, guessing what they might like for dinner, trying to remember what they needed from the grocery store, ready to listen to their worries and hopes and complaints, kissing them good night and again in the morning before they all left for the day. Even after Roger had left for Seattle, she continued to think about him, and wonder how he was doing, just as she thought about Adam while he was away at school. For years she had been wondering about them. They were always on her mind whether they were with her or not, and those years of thinking and wondering about them had worn within her the deep habit of care.”

Frankly, this worries me.

Are we supposed to feel bad for Lorna? Does this help the reader feel the enormous burden of emotional care that Lorna carries along with the weight of abandonment? Yes, Lorna has her own trauma, but she should feel something about her failed marriage. She’s amazingly blasé. A therapist might say, detached. Yes, trauma can do that. But in a novel about a trauma victim, I expect more. Not a happy ending. Not a recovery. But a sense of a life. A desire for something more or better. Anger, even. We cannot have expectations for victims of trauma in real life. In fiction, I do.

At the end of the scene above – the one where Lorna thinks about how much she thinks about Roger and Adam – Lorna concludes, “People love how they can.”

That’s resignation as opposed to insight. And again, I’m filled with questions. Are we supposed to be okay with that? What if that’s not enough? Is it enough for Lorna?

The Blue Window raises issues that so many of us currently or will struggle with, especially women: reckoning with parental abandonment (emotional if not physical), figuring out how to love a child on the verge of adulthood, managing the pain of others, caring for aging parents, moving past cultural expectations, the damage of suppressed trauma, the cracking foundation of a long marriage. I just wish this novel opened a window to some insight on one of them.

Thanks #netgalley for this book in exchange for an honest review in exchange for an honest review. I was intrigued by this book because of the character who is a therapist since I am a therapist. There wasn't anything about the character being a therapist that impacted this story in any way of interest to me. There were too many unanswered questions at the end of this book for me to say that I enjoyed it. I don't recommend but I don't not recommend.

Thank you NetGalley and Scribner, S&S/ Marysue Rucci Books for accepting my request to read and review The Blue Window.

Published: 01/10/2023

There is a market for this book. The characters are too lifelike not to be interesting for some.

This is a miss for me. I couldn't connect with any of the characters. I didn't like any of the characters. My thinking prevented me from even caring.

The story jumps back and forth to WWII where the grandmother was quite active, simultaneously she is seeing her daughter for the first time in twenty years as an adult with an adult son. I had problems with the dialogue between the three, their interactions didn't fit my processes. The combination of relationships was off, creepy.

I was disappointed and surprised the author chose to incorporate profanity.

This was a difficult read for me, not because of the writing itself, but because I found Marika to be such an unlikable character.

I think what bothered me most was that Marika never gave a valid reason for leaving her children behind, and it came across as extremely selfish. I was surprised her daughter Lorna even wanted to try to have a relationship with her mother after that, but as it turns out, it wasn’t even Marika who initiated trying to reconnect; it was her neighbor, who just so happened to be someone from her past.

There were so many contributing factors to this dysfunctional family, and I was left with more questions than answers. I also felt that a lot was left unresolved by the end of this story, and I found that a bit disappointing. I think the book had potential and I wish the author would have included a little more of Marika’s past during the Nazi occupation of Holland, but overall it was just an ok story.

*Thank you to NetGalley and Scribner/Marysue Rucci Books for providing a copy of this book to review.*

This book is heartbreaking at its core! Lorna and Roger are divorced but son Adam (known to himself as A) has withdrawn into himself after a horrible incident at college left him melancholy and depressed so he says very little; actually he says nothing unless hard-pressed by Lorna. But when she is called upon to go visit her mother, Marika--who abandoned her two children at an early age--she is somewhat resentful but takes Adam and their dog Freddy. What happens there is also a whirlwind of events that has us wondering how people can live like this and bury secrets so deep inside. There were moments of happiness, but I really wanted more and I think this will haunt me for awhile.
Thanks to NetGalley for this ARC!

"The Blue Window" was not really the book for me. There were parts of the story I liked, especially Marika's backstory as a girl in Holland during WWII. I also liked the interaction between Adam (Marika's grandson) and Marika once they started to open themselves up too each other as much as they were willing and able, as well as the change in behavior that engenders in Adam.

However, the story starts with Adam home from college after some sort of traumatic event has occurred. He refers to himself as "A" (for anti-matter), refers to others by letters, talks in the passive voice, and is trying to negate the self. That comes across as very obnoxious. When Adam finally reveals what happened at school, it is rather disappointing. He blames the fact that he is a white cisgender male for his behavior, even though it is not a valid explanation, even in this hyper-PC age, for his actions, which were not based on an over-entitled sense of privilege, but rather drug use by a person with no experience using drugs, compounded by being drunk. That does not excuse or justify his behavior, but it does impact the intent behind his actions. Moreover, if events had occurred the way he portrays them, he would have been arrested, faced criminal charges, and been expelled from college, and his behavior would not be a secret from his mother. Lorna, Adam's mother and Marika's daughter, is a psychotherapist and is well-meaning but has very limited self-insight and comes across as rude and abrasive. Much of the time, she is an annoying character.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Scribner/Marysue Rucci Books for gifting me a digital ARC of this beautifully-written novel by Suzanne Berne - 4 stars!

A family can hold so very many secrets. Lorna, a therapist, is still trying to come to grips with the abandonment she felt when her mother, Marika, left their family when her and her brother were still young. Lorna never knew the reasons for Marika's departure yet when she received a postcard letting her know that Marika was living in nearby Vermont, she traveled there with her young son, Adam, to try and reestablish a relationship. When that didn't work, they had only yearly get-togethers at Thanksgiving from that point. Adam, meanwhile, came home from college and won't talk about what happened there and why he won't go back. So when Marika falls and needs help, Lorna and Adam head out to her cottage on the lake in the hopes of reconnection.

I loved the writing of this story, the atmospheric descriptions of the lake and surroundings. It's a slow novel to sit and be still with, very character-driven full of family secrets, trauma, and hope. The relationship between Marika and Adam is so sweet and changes both of them. However, if you like endings tied neatly in a bow, this is not the book for you. There are as many secrets at the end as there are with these characters themselves, but it was only wanting to spend more time with these people that left me wanting.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC digital copy. I was not compensated for this review and all opinions are my own.

I was initially annoyed with the alternating narrators, although that writing technique is one of my favorites. After reading a bit more, I truly began to enjoy the storyline from different perspectives. Unfortunately, I did not feel any type of resolution and do not recommend the book to others.

2.5 stars rounded up to 3 out of respect for the author.

Whoa, talk about some dysfunction. And there's Lorna right there in the middle of it all, stuck between her mother Marika, with her lifetime of secrets, and her son Adam, who wants to be called A for Anti-matter. What? Oh, and he's got secrets of his own to deal with. You would think that Lorna, a psychotherapist, should be able to figure out her own family, but in this case the 'patients' are too close and there are too may walls surrounding all of them.

I have to admit, the cover on this book is what first grabbed my attention. I had not heard of this author, or this book before, so it was the cover that did it for me. But I am so glad I chose to read it. This is a story of family, even with all of its dysfunction, triumphing over all. Holding onto secrets has the potential to destroy—ourselves and those all around us—in particular, those whom we love.

I came to love all of the characters but I think probably my favorite was Marika, such a feisty, quirky old woman. And the way she took to her grandson from the beginning was heartwarming. They truly bonded, two outcasts with deep dark secrets.

Pick up The Blue Window and give it a read. I thoroughly enjoyed it and am still thinking about these characters. I know they will touch you as well.

A woman therapist is trying to deal with her teenage son who's hiding something and won't tell her, so she takes him to visit her mother who is aged and needs help.

I had high hopes for this book. However, it failed to engage me. The use of just one letter in some of the chapters to depict characters was irksome. I found the characters flat and uninteresting.
Even the WWII part, which interested me the most, failed to rouse my interest.
This book was a no for me.

This was a very hard book for me to finish. Though the subject matter was interesting enough because I’m very curious about matters of psychological issues/disorders, I found this very difficult to connect with. The characters were not relatable at all to me therefore I couldn’t connect with the story.

The Blue Window Suzanne Berne is a highly recommended generational family drama about secrets.

Lorna, a psychotherapist, has a 19 year-old son, Adam and is divorced. She has always had a complicated relationship with her mother, Marika. Marika was a survivor of the Nazi occupation of Holland who also abandoned her family when Lorna was seven and her older brother was twelve. After Adam was born she got a postcard from Marika thirty years after she left. Lorna has tried for two decades to have some sort of relationship with Marika, which has only resulted in her mother spending Thanksgiving day with them.

Adam has abruptly returned from college and is going through some secret turmoil of his own. He is withdrawn, refers to himself as "A" for anti-matter, and is rejecting first person pronouns and names. Lorna has never told Adam about being abandoned by Marika and Adam has not shared what happened to him.

When a neighbor of Marika contacts Lorna to tell her that Marika has hurt her ankle and needs help, Lorna and Adam travel up to her cabin in Vermont. Lorna sees it as an opportunity to tell Adam about her past and perhaps get him to share what happened to him. She also hopes it will help her relationship with her mother.

The Blue Window is a compelling, captivating exploration of closely held secrets in a family and how they can take over your whole life. Berne skillfully scrutinizes how closely held secrets that are not confronted or openly explored can result in stress, resentment, and anger. All three individuals here are troubled and hiding something. The tension builds with the three of them being together and not trying to openly express their obvious issues. When Lorna finally confronts Marika, it opens up a flood of resentment.

The narrative is told through the point-of-view of Lorna, Adam, and Marika. The characters are portrayed as realistic individuals, and there is some real insight into their characters. There will still be questions left in your mind afterward, though. Certainly, there was more information that needed to be shared and so many things that were left unsaid or unexplained.

This is an excellent, well-written novel. I especially enjoyed Berne's descriptions and use of language. Life can be messy and complicated, but so many plot points were left unanswered. Even as some deep insight into their individual thoughts and psyche was shared, I was left wanting more closure at the end. It is still a highly recommended novel, especially for those who enjoy literary fiction.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Scribner/Marysue Rucci Books via NetGalley.
The review will be published on Barnes & Noble, Google Books, Edelweiss, and Amazon.

The premise sounded interesting, but I found the story lackluster. I enjoy stories of this genre, but this book felt like the author was trying to do too much, which make it feel a bit disjointed. The ending wasn't satisfying. Too much of the story dragged, and it could've benefitted from a tighter edit. I never connected with the characters, which made it impossible for me to care about what happened to them.

Lorna is a psychotherapist, yet is unable to help her son or her mother who each are distant to her and carry their own secrets. Lorna is contacted by her mother’s neighbor informing her that she needs to visit her mother. Lorna and her teenage son are not welcomed when they arrive, though her son and his grandmother do make a connection.
The reader learns tidbits of the secrets but the novel ends with more questions than answers.

While I found this book to be engaging, I also found it quite frustrating. The story alludes to instances in history that formed the basis for one of the main character, Marina’s aloof personality - but then gives only a hazy, partial glance at what it was. I enjoyed the dysfunctional family storyline, but the ending gave me far more questions than answers. I actually prefer an open ending, but this book had absolutely no resolution. I kept turning the pages, ready for some of the pieces to wrap up, but was left with too many unanswered questions.