The Tokyo Suite had a promising premise, but in my opinion, it didn’t fully live up to its potential. While the story idea is compelling, I found myself wanting a deeper understanding of Maju’s perspective and a more fully developed relationship between Maju and Fernanda. Too much time is spent delving into their pasts, which, for me, detracted from the emotional momentum of the present storyline.

That said, it's an engaging, quick, and accessible read. The novel offers a thoughtful exploration of motherhood—its complexities, contradictions, and emotional weight. It raises important questions about who gets to be a mother, who doesn't, and how those roles are shaped by personal and societal expectations. From that angle, I really appreciated the narrative, and I think these are themes that deserve even more attention in literature.

“Just grab those little fingers and don’t let go…”

It took a nightmare for Fernanda to realize the distance between she and her husband Cacá. She loves him. The life she chose—marriage, motherhood, career—was mapped out. She didn’t expect anything else. “But then life came to find me,” she says of the day she met Yara.

Fernanda created documentaries for television, mostly travel and art before she was promoted to Executive Producer and became responsible for animal programming. She met Yara at the first production meeting for a series that would show top predators in a broader light. The pull to this unusual woman was instant.

With Fernanda juggling her job and affair, she resented Cora’s day off that left her in charge of her daughter. She would have to attend a child’s birthday party, made worse by the fact that she didn’t like the women. It was Cacá who had built the relationships with Cora’s school and her friends and their mothers. She decided to fire Maju, and Maju overheard the conversation.

Maju wanted children but was unable to conceive. When she lost her former position because of her employer’s divorce, Maju also lost the boy she had grown to love. On a visit six months later, the three-year-old didn’t recognize her. She would not let that happen again. Her love for Cora was different than what she had with other children. She blamed Fernanda. Fernanda had put Cora in the corner of her life, Maju thought, and she was the one waiting in that corner with Cora.

Maju carefully plans her departure using a parental authorization Cacá had written for another trip. “And since it’s now or never, come on, woman, be brave…” With that, Maju and Cora were gone.

Had Fernanda left her child in the hands of a mentally ill woman while she gave herself to a career that kept her on the road and to a woman she knew she could never hold? Had Cacá been too trusting, too kind? As their worst nightmare unfolds, Fernanda thinks, “Everything I imagine while we go through this maze of doors and windows is possible, it’s happened to other girls before.”

Thank you to Europa Editions and NetGalley for providing this eARC.

This is an odd one. Although the premise is good, it just doesn’t hang together and the ending is unsatisfying, with no clear resolution, leaving the reader at a loss as to what might happen after. Overall I just couldn’t see the point of the story. It’s a simple enough idea. Cora is the child of a career woman who is more devoted to her job than her child. Cora is looked after by her loving nanny Maju. The book opens with Maju abducting the child, apparently to take her back to her home village. The poor child is subjected to a long and sometimes perilous journey, which hasn’t been thought through. Meanwhile her parents, when they finally realise what has happened (it takes a while) initiate a search. The mother, of course, is plagued by guilt about her lack of maternal responsibility and has to question – again – just what sort of mother she is. In spite of the heightened emotion that the book is supposed to portray, I found it a surprisingly muted book, not helped by forays into the mother’s professional excursions and a quite superfluous affair with a woman colleague, which adds nothing to the narrative tension. Maju’s unfulfilled maternal longings are well expressed, but why she thinks abducting the child is going to be of use to anyone is not explored. There’s little psychological depth here, just rather superficial and banal expressions of class, identity and motherhood, and although it’s perfectly readable, even enjoyable up to a point, it wasn’t one for me.

Giovana Madalosso’s The Tokyo Suite is a taut, emotionally layered domestic novel that quietly builds psychological tension around modern motherhood, intimacy, and class. Translated with nuance and clarity by Bruna Dantas Lobato, this Brazilian novel centres two women — Fernanda, an overworked TV executive, and Maju, her live-in nanny — whose lives are unequally but intimately entwined through the shared care of a young child.

Told in alternating chapters, the novel forms a kind of emotional duet. Fernanda is sharp-tongued and adrift — distracted by an affair, numbed by routine, and disengaged from her family. Her misguided attempt to “modernise” the maid’s quarters into a minimal retreat she calls “The Tokyo Suite” only reinforces the emotional and economic gulf between her and Maju. Meanwhile, Maju’s life is shaped by sacrifice and precarity, and her deepening attachment to the child in her care becomes a quiet source of comfort — and tension.

Madalosso resists tidy moral conclusions. Both women are sympathetic, flawed, and emotionally raw. Their intersecting narratives reveal just how frequently caregiving is treated as emotional labour to be outsourced — and how real motherhood is still haunted by impossible expectations.

Through dry humour, aching vulnerability, and moments of beautiful yet dark introspection, The Tokyo Suite explores the unspoken emotional economies between women across class lines. It’s a novel about love, longing, and the deep loneliness that can live inside supposedly functional lives.

The Tokyo Suite is smart, smoky, and deeply humane.

A tale of two mother figures: a career woman swept up in an affair and the nanny she hires to care for her daughter nearly full-time. Neither feels self-actualized in their motherhood and let work consume their lives.

It opens with the kidnapping of four-year-old Cora. Chapters alternate with their first person points of view, Fernanda, the mother, and Maju, the domestic worker. The timeline is somewhat confusing because the two narratives don’t become concurrent until more than 75% of the way in, or at least as far as I understood.

The translation retains poetic observations about relationships and Brazilian society, and the whole book has a dreamlike quality. Both women have escapist tendencies which often lead them into nightmarish scenarios.

I received a digital advance reader copy from NetGalley and Europa Editions in exchange for an honest review.

(Actual: 3.5⭐, rounded up) As a lover of translated lit, I will say I was bit let down by this one in that I just wish I connected with it *more*— it most certainly isn't a bad book by any accounts and I think the translation is fairly well done (though admittedly I have not read the original text obviously, so I could be wrong in this regard + I am purposely ignoring the formatting issues present in the eARC version, as I assume/am certain that'll be fixed in post), but something was just.... missing for me. This is definitely a character-driven type of story wherein the plot isn't really as important as the former when it comes to understanding the narrative as a whole, and I did appreciate the alternative POVs in order to paint the larger picture. I would definitely still recommend this book because, even though I personally didn't love-love it, I still found the story to be engaging enough to finish the whole way through and there's still plenty of though-provoking nuggets within it for readers of all types to chew on/think about while and after they've finished reading.

The Tokyo Suite was an excellent read. I loved the character development and the writing was propulsive.

One day, Maju, a nanny, takes off with her charge, Cora. Cora’s mother, Fernanda, wrapped up in her high power job and affair with a woman, doesn’t initially notice her daughter’s disappearance. The Tokyo Suite bounces back and forth between Maju and Fernanda as the attempted kidnapping unfolds. We discover these women’s secrets, fears, and motivations through short, fast-paced, alternating chapters. Personally I enjoyed Fernanda’s chapters more. They were more character-driven, diving deep into Fernanda’s psyche, while Maju’s were more plot driven around the comedy of errors of her kidnap attempt. Once we got more of Maju’s motivation for the kidnapping, I felt more engaged. I really liked the ending and the Brazil setting. I don’t usually find myself drawn to books about motherhood but overall I enjoyed this book, especially the commentary on class.

this was my first Brazilian book and after a slow start, I couldn't put it down! It ended up being a thriller with more character-driven elements, which I enjoy. I found myself drawn to both women's stories, though initially Fernanda got on my nerves, but the author took us through both Fernanda and Maju's journeys in a way that painted them both in compelling, complex lights, which isn't easy to do. There were a number of copyediting/proofreading errors that I hope got fixed before publication, but all in all I would read this author again and am glad I got to read this one!

Tokyo Suite started out in quite an innocuous way with Maju, the nanny, leaving the home where she has cared for Cora. At first it us not clear what has happened but very quickly you realise that this woman, who has given up her own life and own dreams of having a child in order to care for someone else's. And that someone else appears not to care particularly about the child she has handed over.

Fernanda is the mother and also the breadwinner of the household but her high-powered job leaves her with little time to spend with her daughter and what little time she does have, she appears to resent. Will all this change when she realises that Maju and Cora have both disappeared? Or will her love life take precedence?

This story is a very slow burn in some parts then takes your breath away as Maju negotiates a plethora of unnerving situations. Who can she trust? Where will she go? Can she truly take this little girl from her mother? We feel all the emotions that Maju goes through including both the elation and pain of what she has done.

The story for the parents is also not clear cut as Fernanda and Cacà struggle to understand where the nanny and her charge have gone.

I enjoyed this book which had me with my heart in my mouth right up to the last page. I felt everything along with Maju. My feelings towards Fernanda were more mixed. To be a breadwinner with little visible support from a partner is hard enough but to hand over care of your most precious child must be even harder. I probably judged Fernanda quite harshly for putting her own desires above the care of her child. You must make your own mind up.

Thankyou to Netgalley and Europa Editions for the advance review copy.

I didn't know much about this book before starting, but I was very impressed with this novel (translated from Brazilian Portuguese). Maju is a nanny that kidnapped her boss's daughter, three-year-old Cora. The story moves back and forth between the point of view of Maju and her boss/mother of Cora, Fernanda. The distinction in wealth and priorities is clear as we get to know each character. We hear all of their thoughts along the way as they stumble into various obstacles.

I wish we were able to go deeper into these characters rather than just this snapshot in time, but for such a short book (only about 200 pages), it covers quite a bit. I was also somewhat lukewarm on the ending because it felt like the plot was building to something more dramatic. Even so, I was quickly wrapped up in Maju's adventure with Cora.

The Tokyo Suite by Giovana Madalosso opens with a confession; Maju, the 44-year old nanny to 4-year old Cora in Sao Paulo, states that she is kidnapping the child. With this admission, the story begins in medias res, no nonsense, no excuses. And yet, one could be mistaken into thinking this is an action-packed thriller upon reading the first pages of hurriedness and paranoiac thinking on the kidnapping nanny's behalf. Instead, The Tokyo Suite quickly builds up layers of storytelling, moving incessantly between the points of view of the nanny and the mother, to weave a character study centered around motherhood, identity - including loss of, marriage, the meaning of home, class struggle, and the exploration of mother-daughter relations.

Through the 200-and-so pages, the reader follows Maju's escape, little Cora in tow, from their familiar Sao Paulo neighbourhood, besieged by the horde of watchful nannies of other children, with her home town just across the Paraguayan border as their final destination. The journey, however, serves as the backdrop for reflections and memories from both women's points of view, writing the tale of two women seemingly at odds in every aspect in life but ultimately bound by much more than the child that has brought them together. While Maju looks back at her life, one of of poverty and the sacrifices that come with living in survival mode, to the point of losing out on the chance of having her own child because of caring for someone else's, Fernanda, Cora's mother, recounts her pursuit of a high-powered career, the disconnect from her family and the affair with her coworker Yara. At the heart of little Cora's life are two women with very different existences: one devoted to her care, living in a tiny room (the ironically so-called Tokyo Suite - Fernanda's choice of name for the small room that houses a bed, a TV, a sink and a cupboard mostly filled with the family's junk like their Christmas tree), the other a stranger to her roles of mother and wife, preferring an existence of overseeing nature documentaries in the jungle with her on-set partner to the city life that leaves her joyless.

Ultimately, both women see the light. One understands she must return the child, through religious rationalisation - every mishap on the journey is seen through the lens of signs from God. The other comes to term with her attachment to Cora, whose disappearance she hadn't even noticed at first, and the requirements that come with it, even if it's at the cost of pursuing passionate love, through what can best be called visceral understanding, the hollowing pain endured upon realising she may never see her daughter again. Neither woman comes to this understanding in a happy or particularly relieved manner: the sacrifices they've both made along the way and the fears that inhabit them do not suddenly cease to exist. This is the story of making the right choice nevertheless. The double POV stream-of-consciousness style of writing used by Madalosso allows the readers to follow each woman's internal struggle as they come to their conclusion, revealing both the motivators and self-defense mechanisms along the way. I thought the subtle build-up of the disdain towards the nanny's lower class and denial of one's privilege when it suits was particularly well done. My deepest respect for the silkworm cocoon analogy that subtly foreshadowed each woman's path: Maju would end up freed from hers, away from the underpaid 7/7 job and the tiny room, while Fernanda had to face crawling into hers, to nest and finally mother her child. Life does not allow to skip straight to the best part, no matter how unfair it may seem.

I thought I'd found my weekend read but I ended up finishing this one in just a day, flying through the pages, hooked. A pleasant surprise in my 2025 reads and an easy 4-star rating from me despite a few translation hiccups in my ARC. I look forward to seeing more of Madalosso's novels being translated in the future.

"And I always thought about what kind of state someone had to be in to lose a shoe, because you can leave behind anything in life, a husband, a house, a city, a whole past, but not the very thing that will take you on your journey. Someone who leaves a shoe behind has no hope anymore."

* Many thanks to NetGalley & Europa Editions for an advanced reader copy in exchange for my honest review. *

Well, that was certainly an interesting read. Within these pages are harsh realities, unlikable and true-to-life characters, and intrigue that’ll have you sitting on the edge of your seat. I think I loved the role reversals most, along with the honesty of the writing. Nothing about this book was truly profound or innovative, yet, it felt like something many people should read, and that some might even find relatable.

DNF at 70%
This is the story of a highly successful mother who is busy with her work and has a romance with her coworker, who is also her subordinate. While her focus is on her work and sex, her daughter gets kidnapped by her nanny. The nanny and the daughter are travelling to the nanny's hometown. The nanny used to live in a tiny room called Tokyo suite; because of its tiny size, it brings in ming the Japanese capsules in which people sleep overnight before returning to their corporate work. Dreadful.

Something isn`t right here. I don`t know if the translation isn't great or if it's my lack of focus, but judging by other reviews, it's not just me. The story is told from two perspectives: the mother's and the nanny's. There is no clear distinction as to who tells the story at the given time. The voices are too similar, and it's easy to get confused. Also, at some point, there are two sentences that made me think that Maju is the sister of the mother, not the nanny. One paragraph made me think that it's told by the sister. And who on earth is Ana? Whose child is she?
As you can see, I got totally lost and couldn`t follow the story.

I adored this. The writing was beautiful. The characters felt so real. I loved seeing them develop as the story progressed. The writing was so poetic and I really enjoyed it

Brazilian writer Giovana Madalosso’s The Tokyo Suite opens dramatically with the sentence “I am kidnapping a child.” Maju, the nanny, leaves a Sāo Paulo apartment with four-year old Corinha/Cora and Cora’s favorite toy, a plush sheep named Bibi, thinking about what she is doing and fearing snother nanny in the park across the street may notice. The normal daily routine would be to take Cora to the club for her swimming lesson before delivering her to preschool, but on this morning, the pair are headed to the bus station where they will board a bus to Maju’s hometown in Paraguay where she and the child will take on new identities.

Despite the kidnapping, The Tokyo Suite is more a character study than a thriller. Even the name might hint that since it’s the nickname Cora’s mother Fernanda has given quite ironically to the small room she fitted out for Maju when asking her to live in. Chapters alternate between Maju and Cora’s points of view and proceed almost in a stream-of-consciousness style as each woman’s thoughts wander between present, past, and imagined future, punctuated by dreams, nightmares, possible disaster scenarios, and even hallucinations. As Maju and Cora travel toward Paraguay, they experience one mishap after another in the present as years of events leading up to the kidnapping are slowly revealed through Maju’s thoughts. Coming up with one explanation after another why Maju and Cora aren’t home, Fernanda drinks, downs pills, and recalls time spent with her coworker and female lover Yara both on the nature filming set in remote parts of the Brazilian interior and at Yara’s Sāo Paulo apartment.

This is a novel about desires and guilt, trust and distrust, loss and longing, dreams and “signs,” and paranoia and misplaced priorities. Madalosso raises questions about the definition of love, about the relationship between the human and natural world, and about the varieties of religious beliefs—Catholicism, atheism, and indigenous Brazilian traditions.

Both Maju and Fernanda need to come to terms with themselves, to wrestle with what is right and wrong. The author largely leaves her readers to draw conclusions about the outcome.

Thanks to NetGalley and Europa Editions for an advance reader egalley.

'...the illusion that life follows a trajectory, that everything will be fine in the end. That we can take the reins of our lives to get more quickly to the grand finale. Until one day I realise I can't control anything. Worse, there isn't even a trajectory to follow'.

Maju, Cora's nanny, decides to pack up and leave. Leave her employers' house, leave the city, leave with Cora. It may have seemed to have been on a whim, but actually, it was well-planned. She wouldn't want to be caught for kidnapping after all. And it's not really kidnapping if you're escaping with a child whose mother is never around, whose father is there but not there. Maju loves Cora and she will not face ever being separated from her.

Fernanda is Cora's mother. Fernanda has got a lot on her plate. As the breadwinner of the family, and working across time zones, she doesn't have much time for anything else. Well, except one illicit indulgence, an affair. Now that she's hired Maju to be a live-in nanny, she can start to be herself again - that's not being willfully ignorant is it, 'I think about how I've come to be a tourist in my own house...'. In fact, just because Cora is gone, doesn't necessarily mean she's missing. For instance, her mother might've just picked her up from school - yes, that's it....

Maju and Cora may have diametrically opposed lives but really they're caught in the same quandry: womanhood vs motherhood. 'The Tokyo Suite' delves into the often difficult and guilt-ridden world of trying to balance being yourself, being a mother, and having a career. It's a balance that requires sacrifice and choices that are not always in harmony with being who you thought you were, or wanted to be. This book has been translated into English with a certain austerity and frankness in language that serves to underscore the 'everydayness' of this predicament.

I thought this was a thought-provoking read and was told in an interesting way. However, despite its short length, it did read slowly.

'I wanted that position and I realized that being a frustrated mother wasn't a great plan, because I'd end up passing all my bitterness down to my daughter'.

Two women in Sao Paolo follow very different, but intertwined paths. Fernanda is given a promotion, but one that will require her to work and travel more than before. Since she's the sole breadwinner and her husband doesn't work, she feels compelled to take the job, but in order to do so, she has to get her nanny to agree to reduce her free time to one day a month. As a sweetener, she turns the maid's room into what she calls "the Tokyo Suite," painting it and adding a small refrigerator. Maju, the nanny, is trying to start a family with her husband. Every weekend, they reunite and enjoy being together, but the additional money offered and the threat of losing her job if she says no means that she agrees to the new schedule, one that will cost her not only the chance of having children herself, but also her marriage. Maju puts all of herself into raising the young girl she cares for, while Fernanda spends most of her time away from home, where she meets an alluring co-worker. Eventually, Maju takes the step of running away with her young charge.

The beauty of this book is that Madalosso has the reader sympathizing with both a wealthy woman coercing a woman into working 24 hours a day, everyday, and with a woman who abducts a toddler. It's also a look at the pressures put on women to do everything. Fernanda may be working all the time, but she's still the one in charge of making sure the household runs smoothly and is the one who is responsible for organizing everything her daughter needs while her husband can control his own schedule. That she eventually looks for a relationship not based on obligation isn't surprising. And Maju has spent her life doing what is expected of her and being a conscientious employee, none of which makes her continued employment more secure when she can be homeless whenever her employer decides she no longer wants to employ her. The power differential is enormous and unjust. But does that justify her walking out with another woman's child? There's a lot to think about in this novel and it's one that will stick with me for some time.

This is the first piece of Brazilian literature I've read but I loved this book. For a 200 page-ish book, there is so much substance within this story. Following Maju's abduction of Cora, the little girl she nannies for, we delve into the psyche of both Maju and Fernanda (Cora's mother). Both of these women aren't particularly interesting characters right off the bat but they are so so human and this rawness is what makes them so compelling to read about.

Madalosso did an exquisite job in writing Maju and Fernanda. They are fully fleshed out with wants, fears, trauma, and inner turmoil that feels exceedingly real. I'm not going to say that she captured the entire scope of the human experience in the span of two characters but these dual perspectives felt more like the turbulent emotions, desires, and anxieties of actual people than mere characters. I'm sure that Maju's experiences as a nanny who has come to care for the children under her charge will strike a chord with readers as well as Fernanda's sense of disconnect from her own family. They are beautifully flawed and multifaceted in a way that evokes sympathy, admiration, and disgust all at once. Even though this story starts off audaciously, with the kidnapping of a child by her nanny, the reader comes to understand Maju's choices and her actions.

I'm aware that this book is an English translation from Portuguese, but the writing was just...clunky although I don't mean that in a wholeheartedly adverse manner. The dialogue between characters is not separated in quotation marks but instead just another piece of a large paragraph nestled between vivid descriptions of the present setting and the character's internal thoughts. Some sentences run on forever whilst others are clipped short. Thus, there is this seemingly disjointed feel about the prose, yet I think it makes perfect sense and it reflects the abstractness and varied unpredictability of human thoughts. Although this awkward writing style makes The Tokyo Suite a bit hard to read at times, it makes the characters and their points of view all the more real. The clunkiness has some substantial purpose to it; the prose isn't meant to be lyrical or flowery because this book is about the human experience and the human experience is anything but clear, smooth, and perfect. I loved the jaggedness and raw nature to Madalosso's writing.

The Tokyo Suite isn't the most gut-wrenching book I've ever read nor did it bring me to tears, but it did evoke a vast sense of understanding for the world around me and its people. As I viewed life through the eyes of two women whose live couldn't be any more different from my own, I came to better understand just how complex each of our individual lives are in all of our ugliness, beauty, and humanity.

This book was so engrossing. I never wanted to put it down. Two stories told in parallel, both about motherhood, but from completely different viewpoints, and about the same child. I would love to discuss this in a book club.