Maria Callas was a name I recognized, but I didn’t know much about her. Through all of the glitz and glamour, she was also a woman who experienced heartache and trials. This makes a famous woman relatable.
It was nice to read historical fiction set in the 1950s and 60s.

“Diva” was underwhelming. Much of the narrative is very surface level. There are segments that provide greater insight into Maria Callas, especially the chapters detailing her final performance of Tosca and how her mistreatment by Aristotle Onassis allowed her to reimagine the role in a more powerful way. However, what I most like about historical fiction is how an author can provide the reader with an in-depth perspective of the people and/or events around which the story centers, and, where it is not known, what the characters may have been thinking, saying, doing. For me, “Diva” does not achieve that. Overall, I don’t feel like I gained much of a deeper understanding of Ms. Callas. The author spends a lot of time telling stories about people taking advantage of or mistreating Ms. Callas, as well as a lot of celebrity name dropping. There are some amusing anecdotes though. And I did like the characters, like Bruna and Franco, who treated Ms. Callas with respect.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an advance copy of Diva by Daisy Goodwin in exchange for my honest review and feedback. I wasn't 100% sure what to expect from this book but had heard the hype so was thrilled to read ahead of everyone else! I truly found this book to have much more than expected as there was plenty of drama to keep you turning the pages as fast as you can. I really found this book to be quite good and would absolutely recommend.

As a lover of historical fiction and having read other Daisy Goodwin books, I was very excited to receive this advanced copy from NetGalley. This book covers the career timeline of Maria Callas. As the title states, she was a diva in 1950s-1960s who is still held as one of the greatest sopranos of opera. We are brought straight into later part of her life and given a glimpse of her personal life as she realizes Aristotle Onassis has married Jackie Kennedy, we then back up and walk through her life as she starts her operatic career and witness her climb to stardom and the elite celebrity/royal circles she engaged in. We learn of her introduction to Onassis, her seduction and her relationship with him. I found her story compelling as a woman who was focused, driven and very unconventional for her time. She spoke her mind, understood how to use publicity to advance her career but also learned how isolating it made her life. I would have love to hear her sing live. The author explores her Greek heritage, her early family life and how those made her into the star she was. Ultimately, I really enjoyed this book and the fictional take on her real-life events. I recommend this to anyone who loves a good romance with some truth or is lover of historical fiction and wants a break from all the WWII published materials.

This is a story that must be listened to! The audio book included recordings of Callas and really set the tone for how to better appreciate the main character's life.
Goodwin has written an easy to read, in depth look at the life of Maria Callas. One of the greatest sopranos ever, Callas was a rags to riches story. The author portrayed Callas as a woman who was dedicated to her craft above all else. Only when she got a glimpse of affection and adoration did she begin to question what she wanted out of life. The flow and pace of the novel were very well done.

Daisy Goodwin’s Diva brings the legendary opera singer Maria Callas to life, capturing her meteoric rise, scandalous affair with Aristotle Onassis, and eventual heartbreak. While the novel is well-researched and offers fascinating glimpses into the world of opera and mid-century celebrity culture, it falls short of delivering an emotionally gripping narrative.

Maria Callas was a powerhouse on stage, but offstage, she was hard to sympathize with. She was arrogant, demanding, and selfish, making it difficult to feel invested in her story. Her affair with Onassis, the world’s richest man, was filled with passion and luxury, yet it lacked the depth needed to make readers truly care about their relationship. The book touches on interesting aspects of Greek history, especially during WWII and the Civil War, but the overall plot remains surface-level.

The novel’s abrupt ending is frustrating. After Onassis leaves Maria to marry Jackie Kennedy, the book wraps up too quickly, leaving little insight into Callas’s later years. A deeper exploration of her struggles post-Onassis would have added much-needed emotional weight.

While Diva offers an entertaining look at the glamorous and cutthroat world of opera, it doesn’t fully capture the complexity of its protagonist. Readers interested in Callas’s life may enjoy the historical details, but the novel itself is just okay—nothing special. ⭐️⭐️⭐️

** Thanks to the publisher for a comp of this book. The opinions are my own.

I thought I knew the story but this changed that! What a good book about a famous love story. We only knew half of the truth and while fiction, this does seem to fill in some holes. Thanks to netgalley and the publisher!

A little romance, a little historical fiction. I had to look up more on Maria and Aristotle to see how much was true and what was expanded on for the sake of the novel. What a fun read and there was a lot that I learned about her story, and even herself as she managed her way as a singer.

Sometimes a book sounds so interesting to me because it falls within my favorite genre, historical fiction. Diva is the story of the famous opera singer Maria Callas. This book has everything to be a rockstar: fame, fortune, scandal.

While I got this as an eARC, I ended up listening to it and I think that was the better route to go. You get snippets of Callas’ voice and that truly helped make the story. I’ll be honest, I thought the storyline was fine. I wasn’t dazzled or thrilled by the story or writing, but it was nice to read about and I’m glad I now know of her and her life.

I feel like this kind of book is slightly overdone. I liked the author's writing style but wasn't all that excited by the plot. I would read something else by her though.

This was a great historical fiction novel. I really liked that it was based on a real person and their story. I liked the famous names that were mentioned. This really added to the story.

I thought the book was very interesting and I found myself transported into the story. I definitely had some least favorite characters and I wanted to scream at them. The way the author could make me feel this was amazing.

I immediately knew that this book was NOT for me. I didn't care for the opera piece or the unbelievable life of luxury she was able to partake in. I wish i was able to get into this one more, but just not for me. Thanks for the copy of it!

Diva by Daisy Goodwin is such an original work of fiction. Maria Callas, the operatic soprano, has a long affair with Aristotle Onassis. It made me want to listen to her songs.

Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for sharing this book with me.

Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.

I think writing fictionalised biography is super hard. Simply because fiction is satisfying and ordered in a way that real life rarely is—you know, it offers thematic resonance, emotional trajectories, structure, coherence, catharsis. To be honest, this is probably why I enjoy WWE over, y’know, actual sport. I mention this because, for me, Diva probably does the best it can with the material, given the material in question, is the complicated, messy life of a real person (to the extent it takes a fair few liberties, especially with timelines, and joins a lot of emotional dots that can only be speculative) but runs up against the limitation of art imitating life, and vice versa, less than is emotionally satisfying.

All of which is to say, I liked Diva, I appreciated many of the choices it made in terms of foreground Callas’s personhood, not just her emotional life but her agency, especially as regards her art, but I didn’t—in the end—love it. I know. I know. It’s a book inspired by the life of Maria Callas. Take away my queer card.

Rather than attempting to encompass the whole sweep of Callas’s life, Diva focuses on the approximately ten-year segment that covers her love affair with Greek billionaire, Aristotle Onassis, and his eventual betrayal. Through well-chosen of flashbacks/memories, the book also touches on aspects of Callas’s childhood, including her traumatic relationship with her mother, and her toxic marriage to her first husband, Giovanni Meneghini. I felt the book did a good of job of allowing Callas to be a fully dimensioned character. It doesn’t shy from her flaws, her arrogance, her mercurial temperament, her volatility, but it also highlights her passion and commitment to her art, her extraordinary will and her human vulnerability.

One of the complicated things about the way we tend to deal with the lives of exceptionally talented women in general—and Callas is no exception to this—is an icky cultural need to turn those lives into tragedies. To focus on these women as victims. And, obviously, there are aspects of tragedy to Callas. She died too young. She was losing her voice. She was, indeed, the victim of several abusive relationships, Onassis being only the latest of them. And while the book doesn’t diminish these aspects of Callas’s life, it offers a narrative far more nuanced than one of mere victimhood, helpless exploitation, and inevitable tragedy. If nothing else, it presents a Maria Callas who made choices. Choices that, irrespective of how we judge her for them, were her own. And I personally feel that’s super important, and I admired the way the book carried it off.

Where things came unstuck for me was that Diva fell into a hole between biography and fiction when it came to the prose style. It ends up combining the direct, matter-of-fact narration more typical of biography with the emotional intimacy of fiction, along with more typically fictionalised elements like dialogue. And, unfortunately, that ended up just feeling awkward and unwieldly to me, like too tonally flat to be fully engaging as fiction, and too specific in its perspective to offer the informational scope of biography. In general, I just found everything very … described. It’s very “this is what Maria is doing, this is what she thinks about it, this how she feels” which made the book as a whole feel static, distanced and probably more artless than is really fair. For example:

"She could smell the doughnuts, and her mouth started to water. They were so delicious; one bite wouldn’t hurt surely? But then she made herself remember how large she had been in Venice ten years ago, how the tops of her thighs would chafe against each other in summer, and how awkward it had been to move onstage. She did not want to be that Maria again, the one who dwarfed nearly every tenor she sang with, the one compared by one critic to a praying mantis who mated and then gobbled up her spouse. Her voice was a gift from God, but her figure was the fruit of her own self-denial."

I think I ended up feeling like I was being explained to, or worse, explained at, when I always prefer a text to trust me with some interpretative or intuitive capacity. Or, at the very least, the ability to Google shit I don’t understand. Like, the book goes out of its way to clumsily gloss words (“Maria felt a warmth creep over her. Her mother had never called her agapi mou (my love) before.” or“‘No, absolutely not like that, you, cazzo!’ said Maria, her nostrils flaring with anger, as using the Italian word for prick.”) and that’s the sort of thing that tends to really throw me out of a story.

Diva also has a slightly complicated POV, in the sense that it’s mostly from Callas’s, but it will occasionally swoop into the heads of other character’s pretty much at random:

Tita [Maria’s first husband] stood up and gripped her shoulders. They were so bony now. He remembered the soft flesh that had enveloped the Maria he had married in Verona nine years earlier. Sometimes he wished that she was still that large, badly dressed girl who could always be soothed with pasta and ice cream. He had loved to watch her eat, gobbling her food as if someone were going to take it away from her. She had been a simpler creature then, her Italian strangely emphatic and full of antiquated emotional declarations that she had learned from operas. That girl had known twenty different words for love but didn’t know how to ask for the bathroom.

And, honestly, this is fine. I didn’t have an issue with it. The only reason I mention it is because I slightly struggled with the Diva’s portrayal of Elsa Maxwell. I mean, it’s pretty clear Elsa isn’t a great person, rapacious gossip that she is, nor necessarily a particularly good friend to a more-vulnerable-than-she-lets-on Callas. But Elsa Maxwell was kind of a fascinating person, who did some really cool stuff (including inventing the scavenger hunt), and, you know, gay AF (despite her public condemnation of homosexuality, which was, to be fair, a lot less cool). Except kind of the only thing the book has to say about her is that’s fat, and occasionally mean. Like, there isn’t a single scene in which Elsa Maxwell is present in which there isn’t some gratuitous reference to her size

- She was dressed in swathes of gold brocade that contained her bulk, but only just.
- She […] put her pudgy hand to her heart.
- her ample frame
- her many chins

Beds groan in protest if Elsa Maxwell sit down on them. Decks of boats shake when she walks across. And I cannot for the life of me understand the intended point of this repeated emphasis on body of Elsa Maxwell. Fair enough, yes, in later life she was, indeed, and I say descriptively rather than pejoratively, fat. But if it’s somehow important that the reader knows this, that’s a matter for an introductory paragraph. We don’t have to be reminded over and over and over and over and over again. And the reason I mentioned POV above is because if the book was embedded solely in Callas’s POV then, given her own struggles with her weight and her insecurities about her body, I could, in fact see, why she might choose to dwell on what perceives as the physical flaws of another woman, especially one with whom she has a complex-to-negative relationship. But that isn’t the case. As discussed above, Diva changes perspective fairly freely. Which left this weird obsession with Elsa Maxwell’s size feeling less like it was an insight into Callas’s relationship with her friend, than distaste the book itself was, intentionally or otherwise, communicating.

It's extra weird in context, as well, because Callas’s body, especially after her weight loss, became such a topic of public scrutiny, as the bodies of famous women (and, increasingly, famous men) are wont to be, even though it shouldn’t be anyone’s damn business. And the book is really clear about how gross and damaging this is. So I don’t understand how Diva could be so sensitive to and sympathetic towards Callas’s lifelong struggle with physical self-acceptance and, at the same time, so committed to body shaming a fat lesbian. (And I will add, I know Elsa Maxwell was fairly direct about her own appearance – I think she once said “I have to send out a search party to find my necklace in all my chins” – but the way people talk about themselves and the way we talk about them are different fucking things). To me, as well, the book’s take on Elsa Maxwell becomes extra messy when Franco Zeffirelli—a known abuser—is in here and presented as a fabulous gay bestie for Callas. I mean, maybe they genuinely did have a really warm and supportive relationship (although I will note he was emotionally abusive to women, as well as sexually abusive to men) but it still ended up making me faintly uncomfortable.

Although, having just been fairly critical, there’s a scene near the end where Callas meets Marilyn Monroe at JFK’s birthday (about two weeks before Marilyn’s death I think) which I found fascinating and moving and intriguingly imagined, capturing the spirit of both women, and the strange correspondences between two people who—on the surface—could not be less alike.

So, yeah. Basically, I wish I’d liked this more. I think, in general, I don’t do super well with biographical fiction, which is on me, not on the book. I think, however, – in spite of what ended up being missteps for me personally – Diva does really capture something about Callas. It feels true to her. And that alone is worth celebrating.

They were the two most famous Greeks in the world. Maria Callas was the leading opera singer. Aristotle Onassis was one of the richest men in the world. When they met, they were both married to other people but the passion they felt for each other could not be denied. They spent the next decade together but it was not an easy relationship.

While Onassis loved Callas, he continued to have relationships with other women and then eventually married the former First Lady, Jackie Kennedy after having an affair with her sister, Lee Radziwill. Maria had married a man who also was her manager for her early career but ended her marriage once she met Onassis. In her divorce, he ended up with much of her money.

In this novel, Daisy Goodwin tells Maria's story, her recognition that a singer has a purse of golden coins which is the number of performances before the voice starts to change and go. Maria lived for her music for much of her career but once she met Aristotle, she changed and started living for love. The relationship broadened her emotional repertoire as she experience the emotions of love and jealousy that many of her opera roles portrayed.

Daisy Goodwin has made a career of writing the stories of famous women. Most are set in Victorian times and she also wrote the screenplay for the television series Victoria. In this book, she has moved into more recent times and explored the life and loves of a woman who is not a ruler. Callas was the reigning singer of her time but she never managed to marry the love of her life or have a good family relationship with her mother or sister. Does greatness require pain? This book is recommended for readers of women's fiction.

This book gives you a glimpse into a life of opera, socialites of the time and Maria Callas.
It’s a fast and easy read that often reads more like a gossip magazine than a book but it’s peppered with facts making it enjoyable and fascinating read, especially if you are not too familiar with the characters.

Diva by Daisy Goodwin has gone beyond the media-frenzied relationship between opera star Maria Callas and Greek billionaire, Aristotle Onassis. The dialogues feel real and true, and even though of course much of it is fiction, Goodwin makes it believable.

I've tried multiple times to get into this book, but it's not for me. I tried the audiobook, and it didn't work either. Then I went back to the ebook a couple of times more. The book blurb sounds so good and exactly what I would like, but I can't seem to interest myself past the first few chapters, and I just set it down.

Historical fiction fans will love this one. It’s the story of opera star, Maria Callas, with lots of dirt on Aristotle Onassis. Drama to the max but also luscious, beautiful settings.

Thank you Netgalley, St. Martin's Press | and Daisy Goodwin for free e-ARC of The Diva in return of my honest review.

"Diva" by Daisy Goodwin offers a captivating glimpse into the life of one of opera's most iconic figures, Maria Callas, known as "la divina." The novel paints a vivid portrait of Callas's rise to fame amidst the glittering yet cutthroat world of opera, revealing the complexities of her character and the challenges she faced both on and off stage.

Goodwin skillfully weaves together the threads of Callas's tumultuous early life, marked by a demanding mother and the harsh realities of growing up in Nazi-occupied Greece. This background sets the stage for Callas's relentless pursuit of success and her desire to be seen as more than just a voice. The author effectively captures the duality of Callas's existence: the dazzling public persona and the vulnerable woman yearning for love and validation.

The relationship between Maria and Aristotle Onassis is portrayed with depth and nuance. Goodwin explores the intoxicating highs of their romance, filled with luxury and glamour, alongside the inevitable heartbreak when Onassis chooses to marry Jacqueline Kennedy. This pivotal moment in Callas's life is depicted with emotional resonance, highlighting her struggle to find her true self after the loss of the man she loved.

The writing is lush and evocative, bringing to life the opulence of the opera world and the glamorous circles in which Callas moved. The supporting characters, including famous celebrities of the time, add richness to the narrative, providing a backdrop that enhances the story without overshadowing the protagonist.

While "Diva" offers a compelling narrative, it occasionally feels like it skims the surface of deeper themes related to identity, sacrifice, and the cost of fame. However, the emotional journey of Maria Callas is engaging enough to keep readers invested in her story.

Overall, "Diva" is a good read that effectively captures the essence of Maria Callas as both a legendary artist and a complex woman. Fans of historical fiction and biographies will appreciate the insight into her life and the dramatic events that shaped her legacy. It’s a well-crafted novel that resonates with themes of love, ambition, and resilience, making it a worthwhile addition to any reading list.