The Impasto Effect

About the Book

This complex, well-crafted novel is a page-turning story about the burden of unresolved identity and the complications of long-held secrets. It is a coming-of-age, psychological drama and a romantic thriller. It begins with a first-person narration told by a precocious little Jewish girl, Cecelia. Her freedom of expression is marred by a family secret kept to avoid emotional pain. Will the secret be revealed so, as a young adult an unexpected discovery can strengthen her bond to her parents and to her first love? Can family love endure through centuries of persecution that enter the mind of a small child?

Cecelia (feeling best when known as Ceci) struggles to reconcile her emerging artistic identity with her conflicted past in which she buckles under the weight of expectations far beyond pressures a child and teen should experience. A modeling career insisted on from her toddler years by her mother troubles her deeply. Her mother’s relentless competitiveness doesn’t lend itself to peer relationships. Ceci laments: “No friends. Cold shoulders, when I get magazine covers. Mortification.”

Ceci’s genius-level intelligence and celebrity status alienate her from her peers, and when her dad fills her young mind with the persecution history of Jewish people, night terrors, shame, and fears result. 

The reader lives inside Ceci’s mind and actions during her chosen transition into college where she becomes an award-winning artist. Before long, however, her world is further complicated when she falls for enigmatic Drew, an aspiring brilliant doctor whose commandeering ways (“He hasn’t asked if I would dine, just presumed, already reserving a table.”) clash with her newly won independence. He has his own emotional baggage, also growing up as a child prodigy. While risky, life goes on for the young couple, who later move from the east to the west coast at Drew’s behest. Living near Stanford University in California where Drew works—a mystery caller of Drew’s returns, bent on violence and death-defying catastrophe for Ceci that ends up preying on her conscience. The reader remains spell-bound, moving toward an unknown ending while building a close, compassionate attachment to Ceci.

This book about identity and love is ideal for a wide audience in Book Groups using Laurie Hollman’s Reading Group Guide.

Endorsements:

“In her layered novel, Hollman portrays characters with exceptional abilities struggling to belong. The central character, Ceci, is an accomplished model, gifted artist, and sharp intellect, yet, she is filled with self-doubt and guilt. Emotions weigh on Ceci from historical and present-day antisemitism—experienced in childhood, college, and adulthood—to a mother who prioritizes her child’s modeling career over her artistic and intellectual abilities. Not until she meets a young doctor, Drew, as exceptional and insecure as she is, does she identify a path toward genuine love and belonging. But this connection comes at a cost. When a dark force from Drew’s past breaks into the present, the novel takes a violent turn. Ceci must channel her inner strength, overcome powerful insecurities, and inspire the same in Drew to move forward. Hollman effectively draws the reader’s attention to external elements that mask personal deprivation, elicit discrimination, and prevent people from recognizing the substance and depth that often exist beneath the surface.” —Aaron Tillman, author

“The novel explores how love and fear shift reshaping the self. When Ceci meets Drew,  unguarded and unresolved wounds surface; vulnerability becomes revelation. What unfolds is not only a love story, but a slow unfolding of self—the fragile, necessary act of becoming.”--Sarah Phoenix, filmmaker

About the Author

Laurie Hollman is a New York-based artist whose work spans portrait, landscape, and abstract painting. She is an author of  nonfiction and fiction. Two new books will be released shortly (summer, 2026):  We Are All in All of Us in Love and War (a collection of her poems paired with her paintings) and The Impasto Effect (debut novel. She received Pithead Chapel’s “Best of the Net 2024-2025” award for the oil painting featured on the cover of We Are All in All of Us in Love and War. As a psychoanalyst, she also authored award-winning parenting books (2015 to 2020), as well as Are You Living with a Narcissist? (2020), which was published in four languages. Her shorter works—articles, poems, short stories, paintings, and photography portfolios—have appeared in publications such as The Huffington Post, The Authority Magazine, Upjourney, Medium, The Brussels Review, and The California Quarterly, along with two excerpts from her forthcoming debut novel, The Impasto Effect. She received an Honorable Mention in the 2024 Art of Unity Literary Award, presented by the International Human Rights Art Movement, for the novel’s opening poem, An Ashkenazi Beauty, published in Never Again: Remembering to Heal and Overcome (2025). Another poem, A Lily in Darkness: Exiled Voices, and a short story, Unhinged, also appeared in Rights at Risk: 10 Amendments to Libération (2025). She has also served on the faculty of NYU and the Society for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. (lauriehollmanphd.com)