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Dara Levan speaks like someone who has spent a lifetime collecting the unguarded sentences people leave behind. Before she was a novelist, before she was a speaker, before she became a USA Today best-selling author as a contributor to the anthology On Being Jewish Now, she was a girl with a notebook, trying to make sense of loss. At nine, at the Interlochen Arts Academy, she wrote because words could hold what the voice could not. At twelve, visiting a grandmother whose body remained while memory receded, she saw the residents of a nursing home as “stories inside these bodies,” waiting for someone to pay attention. It is a revealing origin story. Dara’s work begins not with plot, but with witness.
Her new novel, Shaken to the Core, carries that instinct into fiction with unusual tenderness. Its heroine, Joy, is a Miami family photographer in her late thirties, married to Andre. He is a man from a large family and, at least at first, a man with a louder claim on the shape of their life. They have agreed not to have children. Then Joy’s mother dies suddenly, and the life that once seemed sufficient no longer does. The camera, once her refuge, begins to feel like a partition. She has spent years looking at families from behind the lens. Grief forces her to ask whether observing love is the same as living fully inside it.
Dara is interested in the moments when life reveals its stress fractures. The novel’s title suggests devastation, but the book, as she describes it, is not merely about being broken. It is about what a person does after the breaking. Andre receives shattering news. Then, Joy finds her mother’s camp diary from the nineteen-eighties. A forgotten object becomes a map. A daughter, reading the private words of the mother she thought she knew, discovers a younger Allegra, and with her, an unfinished conversation. In Dara’s hands, a diary is not a device. It is inheritance. An artifact. Permission.
What makes Shaken to the Core feel personal is Dara’s refusal to polish grief into a greeting-card. She has known sudden loss, cancer loss, the long diminishment of age. She writes, by her own account, only when a scene feels emotionally true. Hope is not denial. It is a chosen discipline. She speaks of rainbows appearing at family thresholds, of ladybugs and dragonflies, The departed, in Dara’s universe, do not simply vanish. Love alters form, becomes atmosphere. It becomes symbol, the thing that appears when one is finally ready to look up.
That may be the deepest current in Shaken to the Core. The book asks what we do with uncertain time, but it also asks what motherhood is, what family is, and whether biology is the only route to devotion. Joy’s transformation is not a conventional coming of age. It is a coming into voice. She learns that the life in front of her can still be revised, that grief can become generative, and as she so beautifully puts it, “sometimes a detour becomes our destiny.”
Dara tells me she hopes readers feel seen and heard. It is a wish at once modest and enormous. In a culture fluent in performance and curiously awkward about sorrow, Shaken to the Core offers something rarer: the comfort of recognition, and the quiet insistence that even in the well of sadness, there may still be a glimmer. Or, as Dara Levan might say, a rainbow.