Book Review: And the Walls Came Down by Denise Da Costa

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

“Apparently, sometimes you have to go back in case you forgot something or to remember the right things.”

We meet our protagonist Delia in 2004 when she visits her childhood home in Don Mount Court, a low-income Housing complex in Toronto that is due for demolition to find her old diary from her teenage years. We follow Delia as she searches for the diary and takes her back to the year she spent at Don Mount. We follow young Delia over the next few years as she navigates through much more than she had ever expected and the shadows those years have cast on her present life and relationships.

In 1993, the lives of thirteen year old Delia and her younger sister, ten year old Melissa, the daughters of Jamaican immigrants, irrevocably change in the wake of the breakdown of their parents' marriage. After their father walks out on them, their mother moves them to Toronto from the suburbs – a new neighborhood, new friends, financial struggles, a new home situation with her mother’s involvement with Neville- and despite it all Delia tries to remain hopeful that somehow her parents would reconcile and life would be the same again. Young Delia pours her heart out into her diary- her fears and anxieties, her feelings about her overly strict social worker mother and her father, who resurfaces and tries to keep in touch with them despite their mother's manipulations, and her mother’s special friend Neville and her own budding feelings for Mario also a resident of the same housing complex. Delia is forced to grow up when her mother’s behavior becomes increasingly erratic and with no stable adult presence in her life she is left to fend for herself and her younger sister.

And the Walls Came Down by Denise Da Costa is a compelling debut - a coming-of-age story that revolves around themes of family, complex mother-daughter relationships, mental health and survival. While there is much I liked about this story and the characters, I wasn’t completely satisfied with the execution. I was invested in the story but I found the prose to be choppy (I don’t know whether this was intentional in keeping with the voice of a young girl but in doing so the tone and pace render it less impactful) and the narrative was somewhat fragmented which made it difficult to connect with the characters. However, the author does a commendable job of describing the dynamics within a broken family from the lens of a young girl. The characterizations are realistic and convincing but I also felt that they were not explored adequately. The present timeline felt rushed and left me with several unanswered questions. The ending is conveniently staged but I was glad the author chose to end the story on a hopeful note. Overall, while I did like this novel, I wasn’t quite as taken with it as I had hoped. But I do look forward to reading more from the author in the future.

Many thanks to Dundurn Press and NetGalley for the digital review copy. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.