Review of The Red House by Mary Morris

*The Red House* by Mary Morris (2025). Published by Doubleday.

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

About a year ago (at the time of typing this) I quit my job as a professional film critic to explore what was out there in the world when it came to publishing about the movies and books I wanted to see, not just what was popular in the moment. Digital media and working within it can be fun and all, but it can be grinding when you’re just chasing after all the latest trends and clicks for SEO.

I started this blog four years ago, during the pandemic, but never really took it seriously beyond the occasional post here and there about what I was up to. In 2023 I began to realize the impact this blog was having on me, and other people were reaching out about reading it, so I expanded. Once I quit my job, I decided to focus on the blog more while job hunting, as I do make a few pennies here and there from the display ads on the screen.

During my time job hunting, in-between applying to jobs here and there, it happened to coincide with an economic crisis worldwide, which meant I had even more extended time applying to jobs. So in order to fill my nights, and not go completely insane from the monotony of applications, I tapped into my advance copy collection.

I have a lot of advance copies in general. Publishers sometimes send them directly in the mail, or they send me an email. Other times I have to look on NetGalley and request the advance copies I want to read by myself, which is the main way I get advance copies. I requested The Red House a while back, but I didn’t get around to reading it until the week before I was supposed to get this review out on publication day.

Life just happened so I wasn’t able to get to it earlier, but oh man, once I started reading the novel, I was finding myself flying through it. I read the entire novel in one night because I got really invested in this story.

Let’s get into the review! Intros can get quite long, so I want to wrap it up before I’m full on rambling.

Thirty years after her mother’s disappearance, Laura traces her steps in their home country.

Our main character in this novel is Laura, who was born in Italy, in a small apartment by the sea, and then raised in New Jersey after her Italian-American family decides to relocate. When she was a teenager, her mother disappeared one day, creating a massive trauma in their family.

Her mother left her keys, the car, and everything she would need in the world. No one was able to find her, and the detective on the case even had a romantic and sexual relationship with Laura at one point (which is kind of gross and unprofessional to read about, but unsurprising considering the world). No one could understand her motivations, nor was a body ever found.

So thirty years later, as an adult, Laura takes herself to Italy to try and retrace her mother’s story. She thought she was an orphan from a specific city in Italy, but as she begins piecing the story together, she discovers people from her mother’s past and discovering how terrible her mother’s upbringing was.

This is where the novel begins transitioning between the past and present. Viola, her mother, was raised with an Italian mother and a Romanian Jewish father in Italy during the rise of Mussolini. Because they are Jewish, they are taken captive to the southern portion of Italy.

There, they are held in a building where they are not given food, there are no blankets for warmth, and her father is taken away day by day to treat the local residents (he was a dentist). They were given nothing for their work, and her depressed mother spends her days sewing uniforms for the soldiers. Her brother, Rudy, is sick, his lungs wheezing for air each night.

Viola finds ways to survive, and even has a romance with one of the guards, who recites the story to Laura in the present day. We can kind of guess where the story is going from this point on, but we’re just as horrified as Laura is to learn the extent of her story, as well as how the narrative she had thought was true her entire life is completely different.

It’s a terribly sad story in the end. I’ve read a lot of Holocaust literature in general, as well as works about genocide in other places (my master’s thesis had a lot of research about cultural genocide in the Japanese colonization of Korea), so I was used to this kind of violence and tragedy, but there are pockets of beauty and humanity even in suffering at times, such as Viola’s young love.

Overall Thoughts

I went into this novel not expecting a story about the Jewish communities in Italy during the rise of Mussolini, as it’s hidden like a secret until Laura finds out herself what her mother’s real story is. I think this is such a brilliant way to hide the story from the synopsis, but it can be a bit jarring if you don’t know what to expect and don’t want to stomach such tragedy at the time of picking this book up.

Laura kind of serves as a Nick from The Great Gatsby though; she’s unraveling her mother’s story and processing it. I found her mother to be the real main character, and Laura simply the vehicle to tell her story, as her mother is gone. We don’t know what happened to her, and she might come back, or she might not.

I found this to be a well crafted book despite Laura being the weaker part. We do see glimpses of her failing marriage here and there though. I don’t know if I would return to this book over something like The Postcard, which I find to be a stronger example of people returning to and working through their mysterious family history.

If you’re interested, pick this one up at your local library or indie bookstore for sure.