A touching account of family dysfunction as it exists side by side with loving, close-knit relationships.
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A multigenerational exploration of the impact of southern Italian heritage on the offspring of immigrants who came to America at the turn of the 20th century.
Divorced and later alienated from her only child, Arianna Naso decides to plumb the depths of her Italian-American upbringing, in search of a pattern that could explain the chaos that she feels rules her personal life. The book begins as memoir, with Arianna recalling a pivotal 1963 trip to Florida when she was a rebellious teenager. It then lurches forward to 2008, pausing to present Arianna’s three-chapter manuscript of a biography of her great-grandparents Angelina Rotolo and Orazio Longo. With two babies in tow, Angelina and Orazio left the small, poverty-stricken village of Rutino, Italy, to find a better life in Brooklyn, New York. Enduring hardships and discrimination, the family nonetheless experienced financial success. Arianna’s mission, however, is to understand the darker side of the family dynamic, particularly the heavy drinking and violently abusive treatment of women. As she digs into Angelina’s past, she discovers the mythologies handed down from the ancient Greeks and Romans, the Arabs, and finally the Spaniards, all of whom settled in southern Italy before the country was unified in 1861. Feola (George Bishop, 1997) debuts as a novelist with a complicated text that alternates between past and present and between first- and third-person narratives. Through her protagonist, Arianna, she creates an intricate, intimate portrait of Italian immigration to the United States and of subsequent generations of Italian-Americans who grew up within the confines of their parents’ and grandparents’ customs and expectations. The author’s work is rich with historical tidbits, but it’s Arianna’s personal struggle to break free from her alcoholic husband, deal with her drug-addicted, emotionally disturbed son, and overcome her own escape mechanisms—including eating disorders and binge shopping—that form the heart of the story.
A touching account of family dysfunction as it exists side by side with loving, close-knit relationships.Pub Date: April 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-938812-41-5
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Full Court Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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The years pass by at a fast and steamy clip in Blume’s latest adult novel (Wifey, not reviewed; Smart Women, 1984) as two friends find loyalties and affections tested as they grow into young women. In sixth grade, when Victoria Weaver is asked by new girl Caitlin Somers to spend the summer with her on Martha’s Vineyard, her life changes forever. Victoria, or more commonly Vix, lives in a small house; her brother has muscular dystrophy; her mother is unhappy, and money is scarce. Caitlin, on the other hand, lives part of the year with her wealthy mother Phoebe, who’s just moved to Albuquerque, and summers with her father Lamb, equally affluent, on the Vineyard. The story of how this casual invitation turns the two girls into what they call "Summer sisters" is prefaced with a prologue in which Vix is asked by Caitlin to be her matron of honor. The years in between are related in brief segments by numerous characters, but mostly by Vix. Caitlin, determined never to be ordinary, is always testing the limits, and in adolescence falls hard for Von, an older construction worker, while Vix falls for his friend Bru. Blume knows the way kids and teens speak, but her two female leads are less credible as they reach adulthood. After high school, Caitlin travels the world and can’t understand why Vix, by now at Harvard on a scholarship and determined to have a better life than her mother has had, won’t drop out and join her. Though the wedding briefly revives Vix’s old feelings for Bru, whom Caitlin is marrying, Vix is soon in love with Gus, another old summer friend, and a more compatible match. But Caitlin, whose own demons have been hinted at, will not be so lucky. The dark and light sides of friendship breathlessly explored in a novel best saved for summer beachside reading.
Pub Date: May 8, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-32405-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
19
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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. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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