Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Hamya's provocative second novel (after Three Rooms) lays bare a family's fraught relationships over the course of an afternoon at the theater. Sophia's father, a successful novelist, attends a matinee performance of her play, having no idea until it begins that it's about him. The play recounts a summer holiday in Sicily a decade earlier, when Sophia was 17 and her father insisted she take dictation for the novel he was writing. In flashbacks from Sophia's point of view, she reveals her disgust with her father's misogynistic writing and his philandering, which she dramatizes on stage--in one scene, the character based on her father has sex with a woman in the kitchen of the place where he is staying with his daughter. During intermission, Sophia's father overhears a fellow audience member call the play "social justice for the upper middle class," which prompts him to come to Sophia's defense. During the performance, Sophia has lunch with her mother, who divorced Sophia's father years earlier and who claims her marital duties were a mix of "companionship and coddling." None of the characters escape Hamya's bemused and excoriating view, nor are there any easy answers to the questions raised about expressions of gender and privilege in art. Fans of Anne Enright's The Wren, the Wren ought to take note. (Aug.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
As Sophia's father settles into his seat to watch a performance of the play his daughter has written, he doesn't know what to expect; determined to give her an honest evaluation, he has refused to read summaries or reviews. What unfolds before him are three acts faithfully reconstructing a disastrous holiday the two of them took in the Aeolian Islands 13 years earlier, when Sophia was 17. After her parents' divorce, Sophia spent most of her time with her mother, but the trip allowed her to reconnect with her father, a well-known novelist, and help him with his current book. In Sophia's mind, the vacation represented everything wrong with her father as a person. While her father sits in the theater and watches himself impersonated by an actor, Sophia eats lunch with her mother and lays bare their family's dysfunction. Though Sophia doesn't want to turn into her father, the comparisons between them are inescapable. Set in London in 2020 during the pandemic, Hamya's (Three Rooms) novel provides a detailed analysis of isolation, claustrophobia, and inheritance. VERDICT Hamya successfully dissects family relationships into a skillfully written and plotted novel.--Jacqueline Snider
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A controversial 60-something novelist finds the tables turned when his daughter writes a scathing play about their Italian holiday years earlier. One writer in the family is unfortunate, two make for catastrophe: That's one takeaway from this sophomore novel by the author of Three Rooms (2021). Sophia's father (who's never named) attends a matinee performance of his daughter's play at a London theater. Upstairs, Sophia and her mother--long divorced from her father but recently pulled back into his orbit by the pandemic--eat lunch in the rooftop restaurant, edgily awaiting his reaction. Downstairs, he's outraged to discover that the play is based on a vacation he took with teenage Sophia, during which she served as his amanuensis, sulkily bristling at his dictation by day ("He'd never said please for the duration of their work together") and overhearing his casual sexual encounters by night. As Sophia's father sits in the audience cringing at her portrayal of him ("He wonders what he's done to be so abysmally misunderstood by the most important person in his life"), he must acknowledge that her play is brilliant: "It's like the novel Sophia helped him write, but better.…He'd spent 400 pages anatomising three centuries' worth of the English novel against his generation's attitudes to sex, and here she is, neatly holding just one of his books against the entirety of her generation's values." Gender roles, generation gaps, the nature of genius: Hamya explores big ideas but is at her best offering precise observations; a sly coda strikingly reframes the drama of Sophia and her father. And who, exactly, is the hypocrite of the title? A biting novel of art, inheritance, and evolving mores. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
