The Impasto Effect

About the Book

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

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

Cerci’s genius-level intelligence and celebrity status alienates 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 transition into college as an award-winning artist. Before long, however, her world is 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 west coast at Drew’s behest, to Stanford University in California—where a mystery caller of Drew’s returns, bent on violence and death-defying catastrophe for Ceci. The reader remains spell-bound, moving toward an unknown ending while building a close, compassionate attachment to Ceci.

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

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)