A gripping peek into a bygone Italy and an astute look at the era’s prejudice.
A historical novel set in Italy at the end of the 18th century explores the plight of persecuted Jews and the possibility of religious tolerance.
Mirelle d’Ancona is a young Jewish girl in Ancona, Italy. Despite her family’s business success—her father owns a well-regarded ketubah workshop—she suffers from the same restrictions onerously placed on all Jews in Italy in 1796. She is prohibited from leaving the Jewish ghetto at night. And she cannot venture outside without wearing the yellow armband that marks her second-class citizenship, a humiliation not attenuated by her otherwise privileged existence: “She found it difficult to reconcile her comfortable life with the nightly imprisonment to which she and her neighbors were subjected.” Her father, Simone, pushes for her to marry Signor Morpurgo, a sensible choice considering the businessman’s wealth. But Mirelle pines for Christophe Lefevre, a French soldier under the command of Napoleon while he marches through Italy. Christophe is not only part of an invading military force, but also a Roman Catholic. Meanwhile, a Catholic named Francesca Marotti causes a stir when she claims to see a painted Madonna look down on her and shed a tear, a miraculous moment some interpret as a sign to take up arms against both the French and the Jews. Francesca is no friend of the Jews, but she doesn’t share her husband Emilio’s murderous contempt for them either. He’s pulled into a conspiracy to pulverize the Jewish community organized by Cardinal Ranuzzi. Cameron delicately details Francesca’s crisis of conscience, torn between the anti-Semitic venom of her husband and the church to which she’s devoted and the example of Jewish decency a young French soldier, Daniel Isidore, provides. The author paints a vivid tableau of the historical period with impressive rigor and authenticity. In addition, Cameron provocatively wonders if, while prejudice is eternal, past ages were better equipped to manage it. Nevertheless, the story is a stirring one that never didactically lectures readers.
A gripping peek into a bygone Italy and an astute look at the era’s prejudice.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63152-850-7
Page Count: 456
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A deep and grimly whimsical exploration of what it means to be a son, a father, and an artist.
A retelling of Pinocchio from Geppetto's point of view.
The novel purports to be the memoirs of Geppetto, a carpenter from the town of Collodi, written in the belly of a vast fish that has swallowed him. Fortunately for Geppetto, the fish has also engulfed a ship, and its supplies—fresh water, candles, hardtack, captain’s logbook, ink—are what keep the Swallowed Man going. (Collodi is, of course, the name of the author of the original Pinocchio.) A misfit whose loneliness is equaled only by his drive to make art, Geppetto scours his surroundings for supplies, crafting sculptures out of pieces of the ship’s wood, softened hardtack, mussel shells, and his own hair, half hoping and half fearing to create a companion once again that will come to life. He befriends a crab that lives all too briefly in his beard, then mourns when “she” dies. Alone in the dark, he broods over his past, reflecting on his strained relationship with his father and his harsh treatment of his own “son”—Pinocchio, the wooden puppet that somehow came to life. In true Carey fashion, the author illustrates the novel with his own images of his protagonist’s art: sketches of Pinocchio, of woodworking tools, of the women Geppetto loved; photos of driftwood, of tintypes, of a sculpted self-portrait with seaweed hair. For all its humor, the novel is dark and claustrophobic, and its true subject is the responsibilities of creators. Remembering the first time he heard of the sea monster that was to swallow him, Geppetto wonders if the monster is somehow connected to Pinocchio: “The unnatural child had so thrown the world off-balance that it must be righted at any cost, and perhaps the only thing with the power to right it was a gigantic sea monster, born—I began to suppose this—just after I cracked the world by making a wooden person.” Later, contemplating his self-portrait bust, Geppetto asks, “Monster of the deep. Am I, then, the monster? Do I nightmare myself?”
A deep and grimly whimsical exploration of what it means to be a son, a father, and an artist.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-18887-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
An action-packed, brightly detailed historical novel not much hampered by its thinly characterized central figure.
A free-spirited woman forges a career as a writer and journalist, risking scandal and war zones to follow her heart.
Allende’s latest opens in San Francisco in 1873, introducing Emilia at age 7, the illegitimate daughter of Molly Walsh, who, as a novice nun, was seduced and abandoned by wealthy Chilean Gonzalo Andrés del Valle. Molly goes on to a successful marriage, Emilia grows up with a loving stepfather, and at 17 she begins writing, then publishing, sensational dime novels under the pseudonym Brandon J. Price. By 23, she’s a journalist with a column in The Daily Examiner, though still forced to hide her gender behind her pen name. Rule breaking is in her nature, and while she accepts, for now, lower pay than men, she decides on a trip to New York to take a lover and learns to control her own contraception. Later, finally writing under her own name, she’s commissioned to go to Chile and cover its civil war from a human angle, accompanied by colleague and friend Eric Whelan, whose focus is the military aspect. Chilean revolutionary politics make for less sprightly reading, but Emilia’s individual encounters with members of high and low society lend atmosphere. These include the president, a great aunt, and eventually her father—now alone, regretful, and mortally ill. Although he disapproves of working women, the two share a “desire to see the world and experience everything intensely,” and when he offers to recognize Emilia as his legitimate child, she accepts. Now the story gathers pace, with Emilia—always and predictably the rebel—witnessing the horrors of battle, discovering that she and Eric are in love, and getting arrested. Not quite plausibly, she instigates a further sequence of impulsive moves before the story is permitted to conclude.
An action-packed, brightly detailed historical novel not much hampered by its thinly characterized central figure.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593975091
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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