Café Babanussa: A Novel

I find this book hard to review because so much surrounding it is beautiful and heartbreaking. The foreword by [a:Lawrence Hill 20411 Lawrence Hill https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1233783749p2/20411.jpg] is a poignant remembrance of his sister, and Karen Hill's essay “On Being Crazy” included after the novel is very real. Unfortunately, the writing in the novel didn't quite do it for me. The conversations felt stilted and false. The story was a fictionalization of Karen's own life which I felt was much better written about in her essay. I wasn't too moved by it; but her real story, the one about a beloved sister and daughter and mother who was full of life and struggled with mental illness and died too soon, was incredibly touching.