This was a great story of a traveling family during a character's disappearance. At first glance, the characters seem like a regular family, but we eventually uncover their secrets and it made the story a fun one to read through.

My rating - 2.5/5 

Over the last few months, I've been itching to read more by Canadian authors.  I realized that over the course of any given year, I'll read one book by a Canadian author, if any at all.

I was interested in All Is Beauty Now because the synopsis sounded great - a family saga taking place in Rio de Janeiro in the 1960s right before the family immigrates to Canada.

For me, the result was split down the middle.  On one hand, the book was beautifully written. The descriptions were so vivid and poetic that I actually had a dream one night about a scene that took place in the book (Dora falls asleep in the sand and wakes up to being rinsed off in the sea by Hugo).  I felt like I could place myself there because of how gorgeously it was written.

On the other hand, the book got so lost in the descriptions and poetry of the writing that I never got lost in the story. I never forgot that I was reading a book. While I was impressed with the writing, the story suffered because of it.  The book is about 250 pages (approx 11.5hrs on audiobook), it felt significantly longer. Ultimately it came off ass self-indulgent and overstuffed.  The story was threadbare and really, could have been a 100 page novella.  The rest was stylistic writing which was lovely at first but it got tiresome a few hours into the audiobook.

I received a copy of this book from net galley in exchange for an honest review.  However, I ended up listening to a finished copy on audiobook.

I am so very interested in the subject matter of this book. I devoured it and breathed it in. Thank you for writing it and publishing it.

An Interview with Sarah Faber
by Adriana Delgado
September 19, 2017
The novelist talks Rio, family strife, and the challenge of writing complex characters.

In her debut novel, All Is Beauty Now, Sarah Faber combines the raw splendor of Rio de Janeiro with family tragedy. In 1960s Brazil, the Maurers seem to enjoy a picture-perfect life. But scratch beneath the surface and things are far from idyllic. Hugo, the patriarch and a Canadian expat, battles with a mental illness that slowly withers the dashing man he used to be.

His wife, Dora, tries her best to deal with the strain of a volatile husband and the responsibility of caring for three daughters. Often overwhelmed, she allows herself to be swept up into an ill-advised affair that will have dire consequences for her already-troubled family.

But the true test for the Maurers presents itself when their eldest daughter, Luiza, apparently drowns at sea, although her body is never recovered. As the novel progresses, Dora, Hugo, and their two other daughters will find their lives altered in ways that will either bond them forever or break them up for good.

What inspired you to write this story?

I was largely inspired by my family’s stories about their lives in Brazil before moving to Canada in the early 1950s. I think, in general, I’m drawn to stories of people living in extremis, or in unusual circumstances. My grandfather was diagnosed as bipolar when that condition was little understood, and I was drawn to the contrast of their living in such a beautiful place while dealing with a very unpredictable condition. Their lives could be quite exciting at times, but there were also periods of profound sadness and melancholy, and all the while, they were living in a country associated with celebration, but which also has a strong undercurrent of loss and melancholy.

In the novel, the descriptions of Rio are extraordinarily detailed. Have you lived there?

No! And I do worry that perhaps it was presumptuous to write a book set in a place I haven’t been to, and that Brazilians might read it and be horrified. But I did do a tremendous amount of research. I consulted maps, films, documentaries, and photographs, as well as books. I also grilled my Brazilian relatives and asked my aunt to vet it. But in the end, I don’t necessarily think it needs to be perfectly accurate. Rather, my hope is that it’s convincing.

How did the idea for this novel come about?

I used the basic structure of my family and the broad biographical strokes of their lives in Brazil. I took the idea of the missing daughter from the fact that my mother’s eldest sister died in her early 40s, and while I felt like it would be too painful and personal to write about the particular details of her death, I did want to write about loss and grief, and all the fault lines they can create — or deepen — within a family.

Luiza disappears at a moment when the family is in the process of uprooting themselves from Rio to move to Canada. Is her vanishing a catalyst for, or more of a consequence of, the family’s deterioration that follows?

I think it’s both. The Maurer family has this narrative or mythology they’ve constructed about themselves that their community shares to some degree: that they have — until recently — had a golden, almost Edenic kind of life. They want to believe that it’s the father’s illness and Luiza’s disappearance that have caused their fall. But as the novel unfolds, we come to find that their lives have been unraveling for years.

Why are the lives of the women in the family undone so violently as a direct result of the actions (or non-actions) of the men?

At that time (and, of course, still in many places), the course of women’s lives were determined to a large degree by men, particularly their husbands and fathers. Even though a woman could have in the early 60s become educated and independent, it wasn’t always encouraged. I think women could sense that change was coming, and were restless for it, but weren’t quite at that point where they could fully define themselves apart from men, from male desire and expectation. So, you sense in both Dora and Luiza the possibility for that change, but also the frustration of not quite yet being able to attain it. Luiza, however, being younger, seems like she might actually make that shift, but the “how” still eludes during the span of the book.

Which character presented the biggest challenge?

I think Dora was the hardest to write overall because she’s the most emotionally restrained (and I’m not!). Also, her choices as a mother are sometimes hard to understand, and even though I was writing her, I sometimes became frustrated with her. But it would be too dull if everyone in the novel had similar temperaments. I’m drawn to contrast, and there’s an interesting tension that arises given that she can be quite remote, while her husband is very demonstrative and mercurial.

Would you say the novel is a study about the difficulty of keeping a family together when dealing with mental illness?

That’s certainly part of it, though I like to think it’s about many things. I think I was really drawn to other themes, as well, such as nostalgia and how it can corrode as well as gild our memories. Also, how families create their own mythologies, and how we all construct various narratives about the people we love and ourselves as a way of dealing with uncertainty, and we can sometimes oppress those we love in doing so.

What projects are you working on now?

I’m working on another novel based on a real murder that took place in the 1920s. I’ve done a lot of research, and I’m really excited about getting into the actual writing.

Rio, 1963, a privileged family, trying to deal with the father's worsening mood swings, their declining fortune, a move to Canada, where there is hope for better and cheaper treatment, is brought to their knees by the disappearance of their eldest daughter. Luiza, a strong swimmer, is at the beach with her two younger sisters, when she decides to go for a swim, a swim from which she does not return.

Narrowly focused, we see the detrimental effects of not only mental illness on the family, but the unaccepted loss of a family member. In back stories we learn where the relationships between family members began, the chaos of living with a man with horrible highs and lows. How dangerous at times, how conflicted the feelings were for each other. How they are each coping, or not with the loss of Luiza. This book does a good job with this, it is very well written, but very slowly paced and introspective, often repetitive. Frustrating at times, because of this narrow focus, and the slow moving unveiling of the plot. Hence, it was good but could have been better.

ARC from Netgalley.

This is a book about a family struggling with the father's mental illness. The book takes place in the 1960s when little is know about bipolar disorder. Overall a good book although all of the characters seemed to have some variation of mental illness problems. The book was also a bit too descriptive for me. Full review on Goodreads.

If she didn’t have to be his echo.What would it be like if she wasn’t tethered to him, always calculating his distance from earth’s flat surfaces, predicting when he might next wheel away or plummet. Then retrieving him, reviving him.

This is a heartbreaking story, as a family decides to leave the lush freedom of Brazil in the 1960’s for the restricting skin of Canada after the drowning of their eldest daughter, each family member unravels. Without a body, how can anyone accept the vanishing of Luiza, their fragile, beautiful girl? In the wake of tragedy, the allure of the Maurer family that captivated everyone, locals and friends alike, turns bitter. Luiza was an ‘odd girl’, and patriarch Hugo- Hugo and his madness, that excessive lust for life fatiguing others- it was bound to come crashing down. They aren’t so special in the end! His wife Dora, the great beauty, together they were the admired, passionate couple but beneath their pride, Hugo’s mental illness, his breakdowns coming and going like storms have been washing away the foundation of their glorious lives. The children too young or too tormented to comprehend the ruptures. That this paradise has been a place Hugo’s emotional nature is accepted, it may also have been feeding his boundless wildness. A change of environment is needed, a place with more stability, regardless of how restraining it will be on Hugo.

Luiza has found herself caught in the waves of her father’s mania, how much better he is when not dulled by pills and treatments. Who is the real Hugo? Is it her mother’s fault, trying to fix the very things about her father that makes him a bright sun in the world? Luiza is Hugo’s girl, she too has a storm inside of her both terrifying and mesmerizing. Dora is the true head of the family, keeping Hugo’s chaos contained, but blind to the effects on her daughters. Evie’s veil of youth is thinning, she is beginning to see the darkness overtaking her family, desperate to understand the secrets her naive mind can’t make sense of. Broken by the loss of her sister, both parents unavailable, outsiders interfering and taking her mother away when she and her father need her most. The house is divided and half packed, the Maurer family is in a self-imposed purgatory. Will they ever leave this paradise and the horror of everything that happened? Will they dig up Luiza’s secrets? How are her last days tied to her mother’s deceptions?

This is an interesting story, because on the one hand it exposes the heartbreaking reality of mental illness on an entire family, not simply the ugly side but the beauty and enchantment of it. Hugo and Dora’s love is deep, abiding but his illness asks much of Dora, and she is a woman with her own hungry needs. Dora’s affair in the past has punishing consequences, and there is nothing just about it. Hugo knows what life with him is like, but he cannot change who he is, but lord he tries! He has always been determined to be solid, better, to return whole to his beloved. The reader is privy to Hugo’s thoughts about his Bipolar disorder, which is important as much as those trying to hold him up. There is a seductive power in mania- the unbridled energy, the brilliance that makes it so appealing but too it is toxic in the destructive forces on innocence. Life, such as this, can also be a prison. Sometimes amputation from the family is the only form of escape. Love can be a destructive force, even when it doesn’t mean to be. A heartbreaking novel about mental illness and a family scrambling to pull themselves back together.

Publication Date: August 8, 2017

Little, Brown and Company

This seemed like the kind of book I would like--interesting and mysterious events in a country drawn so as to represent a pleasing yet paradoxically troubling alternative to North America. But the story cannot get off the ground, its narrative weighted down by too many voices and not enough focus.