This insightful story travels backwards in time as Delia, the older daughter of an immigrant family, travels to her one-time home on a housing estate in Toronto in order to collect her precious diary, written as a teenager, which provides a record of one of the most challenging times in her life.

Delia and her younger sister were forced to navigate the unexplained departure of their father, and their Mother's subsequent relationship with a man called Neville, which raised invitably problematic questions for two young girls - not least from the perspective of their Christian denomination, in which wearing cosmetics and jewellery were frowned upon for women. This was yet another rule their charismatic mum flouted.

But while initially their Jamaican mother appears to have been unusually strict - and enforced some arbitrary rules that reflected her very high, often unrealistic, expectations - in retrospect, viewing events through the perspective of Delia's diary, a more troubling picture emerges, particularly with regard to her mother's mental health issues.

Generation gaps are often complicated by differences due to immigrant cultural mores inevitably conflicting with those of the land that they have immigratted to. This is a perceptive story about the things that many children must contend with in order to survive, and the stories that they tell themselves in order to do so.

Ahh, this book unexpectedly ticked all my boxes – tenuous mother-daughter relationships, intergenerational migrant trauma, the eldest daughter trying to keep it all together without losing herself. Tick, tick, tick!

After her parents' unspoken separation has severed all manner of comfort, Delia has to make some semblance of a life amidst a tumultuous coming of age living in social housing. Living in her mother, Aretha, she navigates the changing spaces of her home, looking out for her younger sister and tries to keep them together amidst the nebulous boundaries of their mother's care and the emerging relationships that begin to shape her days.

Told through Delia's teenaged diary entries and an adult Delia trying to make sense of her past, we see there are early signs of Aretha's illness, the increasing violence, abuse, mood swings, and conditions of her love. Da Costa weaves through these events with such care – particularly through the way children modify their behaviours around their caregivers who have desires and traumas of their own; how they press up against each other like opposing magnets made from the same metal.

This was a heartbreaking and tender story on how difficult it can be to leave and let go of the hard, familiar things in our lives – even without a resolution, even if we have tried to move forward in some way. What binds us to the loved ones who've hurt us?

#WhenTheWallsCameDown will be published on 4 July 2023. Thank you to @dundernpress for the #NetGalley ARC of this fantastic debut novel.

Wow, this book was absolutely fantastic to read! I was drawn in right from the start and wanted to know everything about everyone. I have to say, Denise Da Costa has a fantastic writing style that is so easy to follow whilst keeping you hooked into the story at all times.

The cover may have been what completely drew me to the story, but the plot and the writing is what made me stick. I loved being told the story through the POV of the main character and her life. It made the book all the more interesting. I do think that this book is going to be "eaten up" by bookstagram and booktok in the next few months and I will be very glad of it - it deserves all the attention that it can get.

It was an absolute pleasure to read this book prior to the publication date in July. Thank you so much to the publisher and to netgalley.

This book was an insightful look into gentrification and family drama. I really liked that we got a whole overview of the MC's life through the eyes of her reading her journal as an adult, and the discoveries she made because of this. Really requires you to sit and think about it for a bit after reading.

I DNF’d this at 65%. It just wasn’t working for me.

I had high hopes for this one, as an 80’s baby myself, I love anything set in the 90’s bc naturally, it reminds me of my youth. The 90’s are back in style lately, so I guess Da Costa hoped to jump on that bandwagon & ride that wave, but for me personally it just did not hit that angle quite right. I felt that we were told that it was set in the 90’s with a couple of time appropriate references, but not enough to make me feel immersed within the generation, it really could have been anytime in modern times. ?

Another reason I picked this to request is because according to the blurb, it tackles some very serious issues in regards to mental health, & I was interested in reading about these things from the perspectives of the children in a family damaged by mental illness. Not to say that this book doesn’t tackle those issues, bc it does, but the book was lacking the sophisticated literary feel I was expecting. The dialogue felt a bit cheesy & forced, & the overall technical writing level was more so at a contemporary level rather than literary fiction.

This wasn’t God awful or anything like that, but it just was one of those instances where it felt like a book that had been written many times before and that I myself had read many times as well. To put that another way—it was nothing special or unique.

I could have kept reading it fairly easily tho, I wasn’t bored and it held my attention for the most part, which is why I’m giving it 2.75 stars. I just couldn’t manage to find any reason significant enough to keep going when I have so many other good books to get to. Great for an easy vacation/plane/beach ride, but if you want to sink your teeth into a gritty, raw, realistic look at mental illness & it’s psychological effects, you can definitely pass this along.

The cover tho is absolutely stunning & I would honestly still consider buying this book just to have it on my shelves!

I enjoyed this novel set in Toronto and its suburbs mostly in the mid 90s ,telling the story of a black family . I loved the eccentricity of the mother who is initially larger than life a domineering forceful woman who has grandiose plans or her future and that of her two daughters. She rules their life with a rod of iron but things gradually go downhill as she firs resorts to violence to control her family and later signs of mental illness affect her behaviour more and more .
The story is told from the point of view of the elder daughter a pre teen at the start of the story ,who grows up and seeks her own freedom just as her parents marriage ends and her mother goes off the rails .
The Canadian setting was similar enough to British council housing estates that I had no problem visualising the setting which is a very strong part of the story .
I was very quickly immersed in the book and wanted to know what happened to the characters .
The author has a flowing easily read prose style and the knack of being able to define characters well so that they are immediately real people
I would recommend for those who like a relationship novel such as those of David Nicholls
I read an early copy on Netgalley uk the book is published in the uk on 31st may 2023 by Dundurn Press