A bright, funny, hopeful tale of untangling family knots.
For generations, the second-born daughters of the Fontana family have been cursed with loveless lives. Can Emilia and her cousin Lucy finally break the spell?
Enraged that her beautiful younger sister might have beguiled her boyfriend, Filomena Fontana cast the curse long ago. Since then, family lore has held that every second-born daughter is doomed. Two hundred years later, Emilia and her older sister, Daria, scoffed. That is, until 7-year-old Emilia had to make a family tree for her social studies class and noticed the inescapable truth: There were no marriages among the second daughters. Even her free-spirited cousin Lucy, herself a second daughter, can’t manage to keep a boyfriend past the fourth date. Now pushing 30 and still single, Emilia’s resigned to her fate of working in the family bakery and living in her tiny third-floor apartment in the family home in Bensonhurst, aka Brooklyn’s Little Italy. Her Nonna Rose rules the roost with an iron first, watching Emilia’s every move and even banning her from communicating with her mysterious Great Aunt Poppy, herself a second daughter and the only relative willing to talk about Emilia’s late mother. But when Poppy sends Emilia and Lucy an invitation for an all-expenses-paid trip to Italy—and promises that she can break the curse—how can Emilia refuse? Nonna might be furious, but the possibility of learning more about her own mother makes up Emilia’s mind for her. Once in Italy, Emilia and Lucy discover the truth about not only the curse, but also themselves, not to mention Poppy’s own secrets. Spielman (Sweet Forgiveness, 2015, etc.) deftly spins Emilia’s story, layering in the backstory of how Poppy and Rose immigrated to America, with Rose following her husband, Alfonso, but Poppy losing the love of her life. Or did she? Along the way, Spielman twists our fairy-tale expectations about love, curses, and happy endings.
A bright, funny, hopeful tale of untangling family knots.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0316-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A richly inventive work of literature with a colorful cast of characters.
One of Germany's most celebrated young novelists updates and transforms the 16th-century classic Till Eulenspiegel.
The story is now set during the Thirty Years' War, 300 years after the time of the original story. And the boy protagonist's name is now spelled Tyll Ulenspiegel. After his Lutheran father, Claus, a miller, is hanged by the fanatical Jesuit inquisitor Oswald Tesimond for possessing books on black magic, Tyll escapes his village with his sister, Nele. A precocious kid with an obsession for tightrope walking, he becomes a prankish entertainer and provocateur who can transfix crowds with his act and create chaos. Told through multiple points of view, the novel mixes such historical figures as Elizabeth, exiled Winter Queen of Bohemia, with folkloric characters including a talking donkey named Origenes. Parts of the book could hardly be more relevant to the present, including this circular exchange on torture: "Without torture no one would ever confess anything!" "Whereas under torture everyone confesses." In exploring the borders between history and myth, Kehlmann (You Should Have Left, 2017, etc.) sometimes risks putting off readers with his intellectual gamesmanship. More often, he creates odd, darkly entertaining scenes. The miller is at the center of several of them. He is executed for possessing a book of spells that he can't read because it's in Latin. And no one has ever faced the gallows as sated as Claus, who pushes an all-you-can-eat last-meal policy to the max.
A richly inventive work of literature with a colorful cast of characters.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4746-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Tom Jones in the Wild West. More to come.
The master of amiable, easygoing westerns (Boone’s Luck, 2000, etc.) launches part one of the four-book adventures of a rich, noble, pleasantly debauched English family in the Louisiana Territory.
“Sin Killer” is one of the handles by which lanky, handsome, freelance explorer Jim Snow is known. Master of every skill known in 1830s Indian country, Snow is still uncertain how to deal with the stark-nekkid and headstrong daughter of an English lord he encounters when he himself is also stark-nekkid. Each had been bathing in a reach of the Missouri River prior to the cute-meet—he because that’s where he bathes, she, Lady Tasmin Berrybender, because she’d gotten muddy after drifting away from the steamboat hired by her ridiculous, philandering, filthy-rich father, Lord Berrybender. Tasmin is ripe for an amorous adventure and keen to get away from the rest of the Berrybenders. Understandably. Life on the steamboat with them would try anyone’s nerves. Her mum, Lady Berrybender, is a loud lush, and the Lord is a sort of Squire Western on steroids. He’s brought with him on his New World shooting-party an artist, a Polish gamekeeper, French governess, German tutoress, myriad servants, several Indians being returned home after a visit to the White Man’s president, and his current mistress, an ambitious cellist. Along also several of Tasmin’s quarrelsome younger siblings, so numerous that their names drift into numbers. Tasmin would love to trade all this chaos for high adventure with good-looking Mr. Snow in the America she has romanticized, but first she and Snow need to get past his lack of interest in her ceaseless questions and her indignation over his two wives back in Ute territory. When all wind up frozen in for the winter on the upper Missouri, Lord B. will have lost numerous digits, and several of the party will fall victim to an exceedingly grumpy Russo-Indian woman with spurious ties to the spirit world.
Tom Jones in the Wild West. More to come.Pub Date: May 13, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-3302-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
© 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.
