An uneven but entertaining debut.
A seriocomic coming-of-age tale in which a young man describes the many bad choices he and his mother make in less than a week.
When life gives 18-year-old Joey Rossi and his mother, Gianna, lemons, they wreak havoc. His boyfriend cheats on him. Her married lover dumps her after two years of promising divorce, dangling the marriage carats. And they’ve been here before. Gianna was pregnant at 16, and the abusive father was soon gone. Other nasty lovers followed. Now she’s 34, working as a hairdresser. Joey has a part-time job stuffing cannoli at Mozzicato’s Bakery while he finishes high school. Grandma has Dean Martin’s “Volare” on the radio and throws around words like stunad, chadrools, and pisello. They live in Bayonne, “the exact opposite of rich-people New Jersey.” They drink Luna di Luna at $16 a magnum and they’ve had a lot of it when they decide to trash Joey's boyfriend’s car and Gianna's lover’s seven-figure house in Short Hills (“the capital of rich-people New Jersey”). Only they get carried away in the mansion and start a fire. Soon they’re on the road, on the lam, on their way to the rustic rural home of Marco, the one former lover who didn’t mistreat Gianna. Is there a happy ending up ahead? DiDomizio creates an appealing mother-son relationship of comfortably shared lives, including a peculiar affection for Monica Lewinsky. (What would Monica do?”) He takes a chance with having Joey narrate because he’s a young 18 with a tendency to whine at misfortune, which drags on the generally light tone. The humor also often smacks of sitcom, both in predictability and ethnic color. It suggests an elevator pitch to mash up The Sopranos and Everybody Loves Raymond.
An uneven but entertaining debut.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-316-49695-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
Imaginative, impressive, and illuminating.
A 12-year-old girl determines to unmask a serial killer in this extravagantly ambitious story of small-town Britain in 1979.
On the surface, Miv’s life seems to belong to an idyllic bygone era: She and her best friend, Sharon, walk to school every morning, passing a “snappy Jack Russell” and stopping to greet Omar, “the man in the corner shop,” who calls them the “Terrible Twosome.” But danger lurks around the edges of these familiar paths and faces; it’s been a few years since the Yorkshire Ripper began murdering nearby women, and the women and girls of the town have started taking a little extra care when they’re walking late and alone. Margaret Thatcher has recently been elected prime minister, pushing certain strains of misogyny and racism to the forefront of conversations and village life. For her part, Miv is trying to adjust to her mother’s complete withdrawal from the family due to depression. When she has the opportunity to make a wish, she wishes to “be the person to catch the Yorkshire Ripper,” and so begins a series of events that will forge friendships, expose bigots, and culminate in both tragedy and catharsis. The scope of the book is significant, and Godfrey shows a masterful control of the sprawl. This is a novel about a particular time that looks both backward and forward. For Miv and Sharon, straddling the gulf between childhood and adulthood and beginning to learn who they are, it’s a coming-of-age story; for Britain, struggling to hold space for a strong female leader alongside her conservative and xenophobic policies, it’s equally a story of reluctant yet inevitable change. Despite some chapters told from other characters’ perspectives, this is very much Miv’s tale, and hers is one of the most engaging voices in recent fiction, both heartbreakingly innocent and incisively intelligent.
Imaginative, impressive, and illuminating.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781464249051
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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