#Kirkus Review for The Many Loves of Mila!

Swinton���s first novel tracks the life of Mila Simon from her first affair onward.

As a Russian, Mila believes she has a feel for the tragic, and she keenly hears the call of the void even from within her relatively happy marriage. She makes the decision to cheat with a physically unremarkable playwright and director, getting away with it for months while her investment banker husband���s long hours make it easier to hide suspicion. Though she loves her husband dearly, he wonders, due to their lackluster sex life, if she���s a lesbian. Her partner in
infidelity has no such questions or qualms, bringing out a side of her that has long lain dormant. When her betrayal is exposed, her husband���s black-and-white thinking comes to the fore, and he exiles her. Mila moves back in with her Russian Jewish parents, immigrants from Latvia, and begins a strange double life of being a broken daughter by day and a compulsive dater by night. Throughout her breakdown, Mila sees men she doesn���t care for, men who don���t care for her
and a succession of therapists to help with her mental state. Swinton���s descriptions of the thought processes of a disordered mind are spot-on, particularly when Mila spirals into depression over the end of yet another mediocre relationship. ���But I had no strength to say anything to Ezra,��� Mila thinks of a man who didn���t suit her but whose departure crushed her. ���Sadness was suffocating me. I was in Manhattan, but it may as well have been the Siberian gulag: My mind made it so. Inside the prison of my mind was a place of great suffering and hardship.��� With compassion, Swinton writes of the woman���s descent into the blackness of despair and her continuous rises and falls brought on by a string of post-divorce relationships. With the help of her mother and father, Mila keeps herself together enough to encounter a true blessing in the book���s last chapters. Swinton has an ear for dialogue and a deep understanding of mental imbalance as well as the importance of family and the quirks of Russian Jewish immigrants in New York. A riveting
read, this novel will ensnare readers in the first chapter and not let up.

A compelling story about the wrenching pain of divorce and the redemptive power of family ties.