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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 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.
