Review: The Truth About Delilah Blue by Tish Cohen |

Paperback: 448 pages
Publisher: Harper Perennial (June 8, 2010)
Language: English
Source: Publisher

Delilah Blue is a twenty-year old budding artist, so desperate to enter art school that she begins to model nude for art students in an attempt to raise money. She lives with her father, Victor, in a quaint little cabin outside of Los Angeles. They moved to LA when Delilah was eight. Since Delilah, now called Lila, could remember, they lived a pretty secluded life. Her father wouldn’t let her play with other children growing up, and when she got old enough to enter college, refused to let her apply for financial aid. Victor always claimed he was just protecting Lila but it did get to be a bit extreme.

Victor begins to experience moments of memory loss, confusion, and eventually anger. Lila insists that he go to the doctor, but he keeps putting it off. Around the same time a ghost from Lila’s past makes a reappearance: her mother, who allegedly abandoned her when she was younger. Lila must come to terms with her past, including her feelings of abandonment, while dealing with her father’s illness and her future as an artist.

I’ve been a fan of Cohen’s writing since I reviewed her book Inside Out Girl (click to read my review. I must warn you it was VERY early in my blogging career and is quite pathetic!) In The Truth About Delilah Blue, she continues to write about strong, deep characters who must overcome some sort of battle. It may sound a bit cliche but I guarantee it is not. Her prose is detailed, developed, and fluid:

To have a mother like Elizabeth, and then lose her-not because she was struck by a car or swept out to sea by a dangerous current, but because she wasn’t sufficiently enamored by you to hang around-it left a hole in who you were. You became one of those people who radiated worthlessness. You became a living, breathing, walking–and in Lila’s case, drawing, painting, getting naked–tragedy.

You can’t help but feel for Lila and all the pain she is forced to endure. Cohen’s skillful writing paints the scene right before your eyes. The scene becomes multi-dimensional, you not only picture the setting and the characters but you can genuinely feel the emotion flowing from the pages.

Writing of Lila’s reuniting with her mother:

When a child spends a lifetime, or close to it, waiting for one specific moment, something magical and faraway with the power to set her entire world straight, she imagines that someday from up, down, and sideways…But there’s a fact about someday that you can’t possibly understand until it has settled upon you. Someday you’ve doomed the moment you wished it into existence. You’ve already ruined it. By imagining it even once, you’ve created an expectation someday can’t possibly live up to.

It was hard not to like Lila’s character. She was extremely strong-willed and did her best to keep control over the havoc that was attempting to take over her life. The characters of her father and mother were a bit more difficult to like. Her father seemed stubborn and unreliable while her mother was extremely flighty and self-absorbed. My favorite character, other than Lila would have to be Kieran, Lila’s young half-sister. I truly felt for her; she was a child but refused or was unable to behave as one.

I highly recommend reading The Truth About Delilah Blue. For me, it helped me appreciate what I had growing up, the relationship I had with my parents, and my childhood overall. It’s the perfect book club read. In the back of the book, readers can learn more about the author, including a short interview and a list of the author’s favorite female characters in literature.