LEAVING PICO

A boy grows up fast one summer in the Portuguese part of Provincetown when the world he’s known all his life suddenly turns upside down: a sensitive, partly autobiographical first novel from poet Gaspar. Life is bound to be a bit unusual for a boy without a father, but for Josie Carvalho, living in his fanatically religious great-aunt’s house along with his willful mother and hard-drinking grandfather John Joseph, it’s more complex than that. Sober or not, John Joseph fills Josie’s head with an unending tale of an ancestor from Pico in the Azores, a contemporary of Columbus who supposedly found his way to America a few years before his rival only to have news of his discovery squelched through papal intrigue. In between installments of ancestral lore, John Joseph takes Josie fishing in his salvaged wreck of a boat and runs off to cavort with a pair of free-spirited women up from the city for the summer. Josie wishes fervently for something more normal, and, much to his amazement, seems to conjure up a father figure when Carmine, newly arrived in Provincetown, begins to court his mother. Carmine has the deck stacked against him from the start, however, no matter how attentive and helpful he is to the entire family, because he’s the wrong kind of Portuguese: from the mainland, instead of the Azores. When tensions boil over, Carmine and Josie’s mother depart, leaving the boy with only John Joseph to lean on. But when, after nights of intense collaboration, he and the old man finally bring the tale of Carvalho the Navigator to a satisfying end, his grandfather goes fishing without him—and never returns. A quiet, dignified, colorful, ethnically rich coming-of-age saga.