An enjoyable ode to Italian American families.
A collection of personal essays waxes about a man’s Italian American experiences.
Fiorito took Italian in high school, then went home and tried to speak the language to his Sicilian grandparents. They spoke back to him in Sicilian, which was so little like the language he was learning in school, he couldn’t make any sense of it. “Words truncated, or just completely different,” he remembers. “The grammar is so mangled I can’t decipher the meanings.” The experience reflects a theme that comes up again and again in the author’s collection: the extent to which being an Italian American is grasping forever at a past just out of reach. Fiorito’s subjects are frequently the last surviving vestiges of Italian New York City: the last gift shop in Little Italy, the vanishing Italian bakeries of Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. The same trend plays out on a familiar level as he recalls trying to connect with his dead father by exploring the music the man once loved or attempting to navigate his octogenarian mother’s failing health. Ironically, in attempting to document these developments, the author feels he’s betraying that same heritage, particularly in regard to those closest to him. “And so now I am the Fredo of the family,” he says, referencing the famously loose-lipped Corleone brother in The Godfatherand The Godfather II. “The snitch. I say things. I write things. You have to understand that this tradition of keeping your mouth shut is very old. It goes back centuries.” Fiorito’s prose is crisp and full of personality. If it sometimes drifts into a sentimental register, the writing never feels inauthentic to his voice. These 23 essays are short, often under five pages, and range from journalistic pieces about individuals or businesses to ruminations on the immigrant experience and humorous reimaginings of a secret cabal of pizza makers stretching back to Jesus. The strongest essays are those dealing with the author’s family, particularly his mother, who steps off the page as a larger-than-life devil’s advocate, seeming to dispute or complicate every point her son tries to make. Italian Americans, particularly those of Fiorito’s generation, will likely find much here to relate to, laugh at, and maybe even mourn.
An enjoyable ode to Italian American families.Pub Date: July 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-948651-26-4
Page Count: 132
Publisher: Idea Graphics LLC
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A literary haunting that will burrow under your skin.
A genre-bending book that grapples with the diffuse and uncategorizable enormity of personal loss.
A woman wakes alone in her guest bedroom, grieving the dissolution of her marriage to an emotionally manipulative writer. A woman returns home to her apartment, spying a pool of blood creeping under the neighbor’s door. Each woman narrates one half of Lacey’s latest literary experiment, a recursive story told in two parts: a novella and a memoir entwined with one another. The effect is unsettling, like experiencing the lost memory of a book even as you turn its pages. “I felt I’d been shrunk down and shoved into a doll’s house, and I knew then—again, or for the first time—how grief expands as it constricts, how it turns a person into a toy version of herself,” Lacey writes in the opening page of the memoir section. The “toy version of herself” might be what Lacey transposes into the novella, about a woman confronting her role in the end of her marriage while growing ever more anxious about a possible murder next door. Then again, maybe not. “Ha ha, we said, yet again someone has confused the voice of a fictional character for an authorial statement of belief,” Lacey and her husband assure one another in the memoir. Across both sections of the book, Lacey offers meditations on faith, violence, friendship, and dislocation. With scalpellike precision, she teases out connections between her childhood experiences with loving and losing God and losing her faith in love as an adult. There are no easy endings in this doubled book, just an infinity loop of questions and possibilities, a twinned bank of pay phones ringing in the night, waiting for someone to answer.
A literary haunting that will burrow under your skin.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780374615406
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
A personal view of karma, likely to appeal mainly to readers curious about reincarnation and related topics.
A semiautobiographical guide to the dynamics of karma in everyday life.
A Los Angeles–based shaman and “spiritual empath,” Dunblazier stays faithful to the spirit of her earlier books, which include Heal Your Soul History (2017). She sees karma as “the accumulation of the energy of all your actions and the responses to them over time and space”—in both your past and present lives—and says that in her past lives, she’s been an African tribal leader from around 1000 BCE and a French American from the 1900s. Each of the five parts of her book begins with a parable from one of her past lives and goes on to cover a range of everyday challenges from time management to how to handle feeling attracted to someone already in a relationship. At the end of each section, the author suggests a self-help ritual that can help you achieve a goal, such as “Free Yourself from the Opinion of Others.” Dunblazier keeps her message positive, reflecting her belief that “regardless of your circumstances right now, your patterns do not obligate you to continue them if they no longer serve you,” and she packs an extensive amount of material into 325 pages. Not everyone will buy her views on subjects like demons or telepathy, and Penn’s bold illustration of a concentration camp prisoner, in an image that also shows a crowd of smiling, well-dressed people around a table bearing a vast amount of food, will strike some as insensitive. Nevertheless, even readers skeptical of whether they are reading the words of a reincarnated Chief Running Bear may be intrigued by her information on how people make use of concepts like totem animals. For most readers, this book will provide different ways of looking at things. And who wouldn’t want to believe, as the author does, that in the end “you are the master of your universe”?
A personal view of karma, likely to appeal mainly to readers curious about reincarnation and related topics. (notes, bibliography)Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9963907-6-7
Page Count: 324
Publisher: GoTracee Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
© 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.
