I really wanted to like this book. Ultimately, I didn't love it.

The story has two plot lines. One follows a middle-aged woman who runs away from her life and marriage seeking she-doesn’t-know-what in her long-missing mother’s homeland of Italy. Misadventure ensues.

The second plot line chronicles her mother’s (long before she was a mother, or missing) and her family’s brutal experience in a detention center for Jewish immigrants during WWII. Plus an illicit love affair with an Italian guard. Plus… mural-painting.

Misadventure continues.

Lots of Italian-American women (and men) seem to romanticize returning to their ancestral homeland to find answers to their modern existential problems, as fictionalized in the fun beach read The Sicilian Inheritance by Jo Piazza and countless other works. It’s a familiar heartwarming story except when it isn’t, as in Season 2 of White Lotus.

Another familiar romanticization - or fixation - that features in The Red House: the disappearing mother. Is this a writer thing? In early drafts of my own novel, I had the mother crawling out the window, running away, leaving her kids to fend for themselves, never to be found again. Even in the current draft, she has a tendency to flee.

Do we write these stories because it’s so often the fathers in real life that disappear, physically or emotionally, and we want to fictionalize our lives by flipping everything inside out? Is it an attempt to work through our own lived experience?

Or is it us writers living vicariously through our maternal characters, escaping the mundane realities of daily life so that we can finally find that long-sought-after, impossible-to-fully-attain PEACE AND QUIET?

Whatever the case may be, I can’t help but wish the book had been written from the perspective of the fugitive mother herself. As it is, we’re left on the outside of two stories looking in, wondering what’s really going on in there.

As a fledgling Substacker and an experimental book reviewer, I have to ask myself what purpose a post like this serves. I don’t want to say negative things about any writer or their work, but I also want to be honest and engage in a real way with the books I read.

So I will send this out. Maybe the description will pique someone’s interest, and they will enjoy the book more than I did. What I would still like to read at some point is some of Morris’ non-fiction travel writing. So stay tuned for that.

P.S. Preorders help authors and their book sales. The Red House comes out in May.

When Laura's mother goes missing with no sign of why she left or where she went, Laura's family spends the next many, many years wondering what happened to her. With her own adult life in shambles, Laura decides to go Italy, where he mother grew and and lived through the horrors of WWII hoping to get some clues as to what happened to her mother. Follow Laura along as she learns about her mother's secret past and all she suffered.

I received an ARC from NetGalley; however, my review is my own opinion and done of my own volition.

A lyrical and evocative novel about loss and discovery and self and otherness. Morris, of whom I've long been a fan, writes a story about the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that is both monumental—taking in war and displacement and massive upheaval and death—and intimate—about parents and growing up and place and habits. Laura's mother disappears when Laure is young, and Laura, after years of uncertainty, steps into her own investigation of who her mother was, traveling to places where her mother lived and finding lives with whom hers intersected. It's an elegant work about family and about despair, a eulogy and a cautionary tale all braided together. Highly recommend; I think it's a great novel to discussin book groups or classes.

Mary Morris’s novel, The Red House, is a compelling story about a woman’s search for her lost mother while coming to terms with her own life’s issues and relationship challenges. Laura’s mom, Viola, left her husband and two young children with no explanation. It’s unclear if she was abducted or left voluntarily. Thirty years later, Laura impulsively decides to follow some clues about her mother’s prior life by tracing her existence in Italy. She learns about her mother’s painful past as she tries to understand more about what led to her mother’s disappearance. The book bounces between Viola and Laura’s stories and is written in a stream of consciousness style. I enjoyed the book although the storyline is quite sad and the reader is still left with questions at the end. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC for this book.

I am a very big Mary Morris fan! Her newest novel "The Red House" did NOT disappoint! A tragic, melancholy tale, spanning the US and Italy, as a daughter, now an adult, retraces her mother's life in order to achieve closure. Was so vivid, surprising and astounding. An excellent book! Thank you NetGalley, the author and publisher for the review copy. All opinions are my own.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this eARC.

The Red House by Mary Morris - unfortunately this book was a DNF (did not finish) for me. I struggled through a third of the book without the element essential to my reading enjoyment established, I did not care (or know) anything about the protagonist.

Strong character development provides the "hook" that makes us elect to read this ONE book before all the others in our coffers, and The Red House, sadly, never provided this essential ingredient.

This was a depressing book but it was written well. We are taken to different settings in current and WWII Italy and introduced to the people there — some kind, many not. In each place, Laura learns more about her mother, Viola, and what she went through, with her time in the red house giving Laura a lot of insight.
What doesn't make much sense is that her mother put on a great show while she raised her children, and she appeared to be a loving, happy wife, and she fooled everyone. Realistically, I don't think that is possible.
There is one part of the book that rushes through many years of what Viola did after the red house, when it feels like it should have had a similar pace to it. Then we come back to the present day and finally understand what happened to Viola.
I suppose true literary fiction is slow and steady prose about realistic stories. This book is a fairly good representation of the genre. 3.9/5

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC of The Red House.

This is a story about Laura's mom Viola who went missing 30 years ago. Now in her early 40s, and her missing mom's whereabouts still unresolved, Laura embarks on a personal journey of self-reflection and painful truths from her past and her mothers.

Armed with few clues, including her mother's mysterious paintings of a red house, Laura travels to Italy and retraces her mother's footsteps to a past she never wished to talk about.

When she discovers her mother's painful secrets and the harsh truths that led to her disappearance, Laura is finally able to face her own life and what needs to be done to get back on track.

As some readers noted, there is no distinction between the chapters; sometimes we're reading Laura's POV and other times from Viola but that's not made clear. There are no chapter headings/titles to distinguish whose chapter it is.

I enjoyed the writing; deep, thoughtful, but very stream of consciousess-like as chapters flip flop from Laura's investigation and remembering something from her childhood; an aspect of her mother she's recalling or an event from her childhood or the case into her mother's disappearance and the strain it put on her, her sister and dad.

Not surprisingly, I found the most interesting character to be Viola; strong, determined, a survivor.

I didn't dislike Laura, but I didn't like her; despite the narrative being carried by her POV, I found her character development lacking.

But this is really about Viola and how the time she spent in the Red House changed the course of her life forever.

I was hoping the narrative was more of a straightforward mystery, not something that traced back to the atrocities of WWII.

I'm not a fan of narratives with war themes but I'm grateful for the opportunity to read a novel from an author I've never read before.

I found myself getting distracted with this one.
I wouldn’t say it was the story itself, but I just wasn’t in the mood for this thriller.

coming-of-age, WW2, Italy, artist, paintings, angst, missing-persons, historical-novel, historical-research, historical-setting, history-and-culture, tragedy, loss, love, librarian****

Laura’s mother, Viola, disappeared 30 years ago leaving her husband and two children behind. Now Laura travels and interviews and reflects on the past in an effort to retrace her mother's life. The plot is broken into 4 stories to make the whole more cohesive. Very interesting story.
I requested and received a temporary uncorrected proof from Doubleday Books via NetGalley. Pub Date May 13, 2025
##TheRedHouse by Mary Morris #doubledaybooks#NetGalley
#goodreads #bookbub #librarythingofficial #comingOfAge #barnesandnoble **** Review #booksamillion #bookshop_org #bookshop_org_uk #kobo #Waterstones #italy #historical

Thank you Netgalley for this ARC. Laura is looking for her mother who disappeared decades ago. What she uncovers is a story she has never heard before. Through this journey, she is introduced to a woman she never knew. Compelling and heartbreaking. A must read!

3.9. An interesting novel that transfers between WWII and present day Italy. Laura’s mother disappeared over 30 years before with no trace or reason for leaving. Laura goes to Italy and decides to try to piece together her mother’s early life in Italy to try to close the chapter and understand the reason for her leaving. Her journey takes her on a heartbreaking complicated path to find the truth, finding people who had connections to her mother in her mother’s early life. A story of pain, loss, tragedy, love, and rebirth. Although seemingly well researched and some good character development, I did find some parts were lacking in clarity. I did not like this book as much as Gateway to the Moon, but I did like it, along with the historical part that dealt with WWII Italy. Thank you to Netgalley for providing me an advance copy in exchange for a candid and unbiased review.

I enjoyed this story, set mostly in Italy during World War II. An Italian Jewish family is sent to a detention (Red) house. We follow members intergenerational and toggle back and forth between modern times and the early 1940s when they are detained due to ethnicity, experience starvation, no heat in the freezing winter, and are forced to work (albeit more humanely than the concentration camps in Germany). While it is always difficult to read of the human atrocities in WWII, the story set in Italy was a fresh and enjoyable take. Well written.

I received an ARC of this novel from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I really got drawn into this novel. The parallels between the mother and daughter were heartbreaking and powerful. The ending was both terrible and what I hoped for--the alternative was too overwhelming.

The Red House
Laura’s mother disappeared 30 years ago,leaving her husband and two children behind. The detective who was assigned to the case when Viola went missing couldn’t come up with any results at the time of the disappearance. Now 30 years later, he might have a new lead. Laura travels to Italy to try retracing her mother’s life when she was a child during WWII. Brief chapters alternate between present and the past, in a very confusing way. It’s not easy to figure out the constant change in time. Chapters are very brief, end suddenly and the writing is at best young adult level. Viola is the main character, I couldn’t sympathize with her either during the war or later leaving her family. She was always only looking out for herself. Laura’s affair with the detective not only doesn’t add to the story, it rather dilutes it. There are a lot of unnecessary details that makes the novel drag. Only 3 stars at best for this one.
I received a complimentary copy from NetGalley, opinions are my own.

quite stream of conscious but i found that it worked fairly wel. a lot of perspective and people jumping but brings out interesting ww2 history. 3.5 stars. tysm for the arc.

Thank you to Author Mary Morris, Doubleday Books and NetGalley for an ARC of The Red House.

Decades after her mother, Viola, goes missing, Laura finds her life and marriage in a slump. Her inner voice tells her that in order to move on, she needs to close the chapter on her mother's mysterious disappearance.

Viola grew up in Italy during WWII and Laura has very little to go on other than the name of the region that Viola grew up in, her maiden name, the paintings that Viola has created of a red house and the odd message she has scrawled on the back saying, "I will not be here forever."

Laura's trip to Italy turns into a puzzle, taking her from Brindisi where she was born to Puglia where she learns that her mother spent part of the war in the red house she had painted. She meets a man there who knew her mother during the war and learns things about her mother that starts to fill in some of the answers she has been looking for.

I found some of the writing repetitive in regards to how Laura's family fell apart after her mother's disappearance. However, I liked the overall story. Morris wove a tale of history with a criminal element as she bounced between Viola's life in Italy during the war and the aftermath of her leaving her family. Though largely a historical fiction, I also think this book would appeal to those who like a mystery.

I didn’t love this one and I had enjoyed this author’s previous book. I felt it had a bit too much stream of conscious writing and at times too much back story. Instead of drawing me in it left me just wanting to get back to the main story.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an early release in exchange for a fair and honest review.

I really liked this book! I love how it was like a scavenger hunt with a lot of different clues, and we were putting together what happened to the mother. A lot of different secrets and revelations come up while reading. I thought there was a good writing style here in this book, and I enjoyed it.


Thank you to NetGalley, to the author, and to the publisher for this complementary ARC in exchange for my honest review!!!

Reading this novel has been an unexpected and beautiful surprise! I often feel that books are very predictable, knowing where it will end after reading a few pages. This novel was an engaging and moving story of a woman in search of her mother. Laura’s mother literally walked out of her house one day and disappeared. An call from the detective spurs her to go on her own search.

Laura returns to Italy looking for a red house that had been portrayed in her mother’s paintings. What she finds is not only a house but a history of her family that she knew NOTHING about.

The author brilliantly blends fiction with history and creates a novel that is compelling and unforgettable. I highly recommend this to all my readers. Thank you Netgalley for the opportunity to read this exquisite novel.