A mob story with the prerequisite hits, casinos and Italian food, but augmented by a strong sense of camaraderie.
Carraturo’s novel tells the decades-long story of the mob-related Scalamarri family living through good and hard times.
In 1947, mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel was killed at his home. The identity of his assassin most likely resides somewhere in the lineage of the Scalamarri family, who lost 12 of its members in a fire—what came to be known as the Sunday Night Massacre. Vincent, the surviving son who witnessed the murders, tells his story years later to his grandson, Tony, and friends, Sal and Chris, all descendants of the Scalamarris. Tony and Sal agree to sever all association they have with gangsters, and Chris, a successful financial advisor, works out a deal with a friend at the FBI, allowing the other men to act as informants. The plan goes awry when wise guys start getting whacked. The author’s novel is a prequel of sorts to his previous book (Cameron Nation, 2011), which featured Chris as the protagonist. The title of his latest is a little misleading: It’s a reference to the three friends, but the plot jumps around the family tree, whose branches are depicted throughout the novel with a helpful visual, especially considering the vast number of characters in the book. In fact, the back story—Vincent’s involvement in World War II, his quest for retribution and his falling in love—is tighter and more interesting. The author aptly manages frequent leaps, sometimes with dark humor. As the two timelines converge, the novel picks up pace with stellar results: a Fed goes undercover and a seemingly insignificant character returns to chuck a wrench into the FBI’s scheme. Blending plot with real-world events and people—Watergate, George Raft and Frank Sinatra—adds a dash of authenticity to the epic.
A mob story with the prerequisite hits, casinos and Italian food, but augmented by a strong sense of camaraderie.Pub Date: April 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-1469778280
Page Count: 267
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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