A tender, spirited family tale to complete a warm, earnest series.
In this conclusion to Cardillo’s (Dancing on Sunday Afternoons, 2017, etc.) dramatic trilogy, a grief-ridden widow and her teenage son search for solace at her family’s island cottage.
It’s been a year since Florence resident Elizabeth Todd Innocenti lost Antonio, her husband of 14 years, to ALS. Her sorrow’s compounded by her mother-in-law, Adriana, who never accepted her and seems to resent her for still being alive. So Elizabeth takes up her grandmother Lydia Hammond on an offer to spend the summer at Innisfree, a cottage on Chappaquiddick Island, just off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. Bringing along her son, Matteo, Elizabeth believes returning to her home will help them both. But she has her work cut out for her: elderly Lydia had to abandon Innisfree for a nursing home two years ago, and the cottage is now dilapidated. Elizabeth’s relationship with Matteo is also in need of repair, as his sorrow turns to anger and he sometimes lashes out at his mother. Elizabeth hopes to reignite her passion for documentary filmmaking (stunted during Antonio’s illness) and may be falling for a local, Caleb Monroe, grandson to Tobias, Innisfree’s former caretaker. But her most important decision is where she and Matteo will call home: Italy or Chappaquiddick Island. As in previous novels, Cardillo’s slowly unfolding narrative is steeped in lavish melodrama. A theme of family, for one, enriches the story: Adriana rejects Elizabeth, but the widow likewise keeps Caleb at bay, fearing his closeness could mean he’s replacing Antonio as Matteo’s father—or becoming something much more to her. The author’s fervent prose induces striking imagery brimming with emotion, like her description of isolated, battered Innisfree, which Elizabeth discerns is just as “needy” as she is. Despite the saga’s potential for utter bleakness, it’s often upbeat. Romance between Elizabeth and Caleb develops leisurely but effectively; Elizabeth reunites with beloved Izzy (Caleb’s aunt); and endlessly droll Lydia, still stuck in a nursing home, asks her granddaughter to “argue before my parole board and get me out of this joint.”
A tender, spirited family tale to complete a warm, earnest series.Pub Date: April 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-942209-37-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: Bellastoria Press
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
