Up from the Blue by Susan Henderson Review: A Haunting Debut of Family and Loss

The premise of Susan Henderson's debut novel is simple and devastating: Tillie is eight years old when her mother vanishes without explanation, and the rest of her life is shaped by the absence. Published by Harper Perennial in September 2010, the novel follows young Tillie's startling discoveries about what actually happened to her mother, interwoven with a grown Tillie whose relationships remain, as one early reader account put it, stuck in the past. The mother at the story's center is a 1970s housewife living with bipolar illness, and the novel is fundamentally about what a family does — and hides — when one of its members is unwell in an era with little language or tolerance for it.

Henderson structures the book around Tillie at two ages: the imaginative child trying to make sense of the disappearance in real time, and the adult still negotiating the fallout. This dual perspective is the engine of the book's mystery element — the publisher describes it as "part mystery, part coming-of-age" — because the reader learns the truth alongside young Tillie while watching grown Tillie reckon with its consequences. The design lets Henderson examine how childhood misunderstanding hardens into adult estrangement, and how the stories families tell to protect themselves can do their own damage. The strained relationship at the book's core, between Tillie and her father, has been frozen since the year her mother vanished, and the novel treats thawing it as its own kind of suspense.

The setting is not decoration. The novel unfolds against a tumultuous period in American life — desegregation, school busing, and the early rise of modern feminism — and uses that backdrop to frame its central subject: the stigma of mental illness and the heartbreaking outcome of one family's shame. Henderson's authorial intent is on record in her own comments about the book: she has described writing it as an act of healing, saying she learned about love and acceptance of, and even a kind of glory in, people's shortcomings, and that she hoped the story would heal something in her readers as well. That ambition places the novel in the company of family-dysfunction fiction that treats mental illness with seriousness rather than as a plot device — publisher comparisons point readers toward Jennifer McMahon, Katrina Kittle, and Laura Kasischke, and at least one reader reached for Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle as the nearest reference point.

Advance and early praise, carried in the publisher's materials, was warm. Sarah-Kate Lynch in New Zealand Woman's Weekly called it an incredibly accomplished debut and "totally enthralling," while Nicky Pellegrino in the New Zealand Herald praised it as an engrossing and sensitively written portrait of a family struggling with mental illness. Henderson arrived with real credentials for a first novelist — a Pushcart Prize nomination and a visible presence as the founder of the writers' community LitPark.com — and the book found champions beyond print reviews, including a public shout-out from Rosie O'Donnell. Readers should nonetheless calibrate expectations: this is a small-press-feeling literary debut rather than a breakout with a vast documented readership, and its strengths are quiet ones. Those who come for a propulsive whodunit may find the mystery secondary to the emotional portrait, and the subject matter — a mother's illness, a family's silence — is heavy going by design.

Up from the Blue suits readers of literary family dramas who value character and emotional truth over plot mechanics — those drawn to mother-daughter stories, to fiction about mental illness handled with compassion, or to 1970s-set coming-of-age narratives. At 336 pages in its Harper Perennial paperback edition, it is a compact, self-contained read rather than an undertaking. Its honest interest in forgiveness — in whether a daughter can understand a mother who left, and a father who let the silence stand — is the thing its admirers consistently single out, and the thing most likely to stay with a reader after the last page.