Some interesting ideas don’t mesh well with a whole lot of melodrama.
Summers in Puglia forge fraught bonds between a privileged girl from Turin and three local boys in a through-the-years saga jam-packed with events.
Bern, Nicola, and Tommaso live on the farm adjacent to Teresa's grandmother’s home, and Teresa is fascinated by the trio from the instant she spots them taking an illicit nighttime swim in her grandmother’s pool when she's 14. By the time she’s 17, she and Bern are lovers, which arouses Nicola’s and particularly Tommaso’s jealousy. Bern’s devotion to Italo Calvino’s novel The Baron in the Trees none-too-subtly flags him as given to extremes, and as the novel flashes forward to 2012, Tommaso’s drunken revelations to 32-year-old Teresa reveal that the boys’ bond was closer and weirder than she ever knew. Then we’re whisked back to 2003, when Teresa inherits her grandmother’s estate, which includes the farm where Bern, Tommaso, and some new friends—Nicola glaringly not among them—are now squatting. Still fixated on Bern, Teresa joins their commune devoted to sustainable living and guerrilla activism in defense of the environment. Incident piles on top of incident: The commune breaks up; Teresa and Bern have trouble conceiving a child and decide to get married to raise money for infertility treatments; those don’t work, so she sets Bern free by pretending she’s been unfaithful. What all this has to do with the insistently reiterated theme of Bern’s yearning for absolutes is murky—until Tommaso’s confession resumes, and readers learn what drove Bern to the act that results in his fleeing Italy. His final meeting with Teresa has touching moments, muffled by the extreme improbability of the circumstances. Grappling with material similar to Richard Powers’ masterful The Overstory (2018), Giordano gets bogged down in plot and fails to persuasively convey his characters’ ideological passions. Bern remains an enigma, as does Teresa’s devotion to him.
Some interesting ideas don’t mesh well with a whole lot of melodrama.Pub Date: July 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-984877-31-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
An uncompromising message, delivered via a gripping story with two engaging heroines.
An undergraduate at Brown University unearths the buried history of a Latine artist.
As in her bestselling debut, Olga Dies Dreaming (2022), Gonzalez shrewdly anatomizes racial and class hierarchies. Her bifurcated novel begins at a posh art-world party in 1985 as the title character, a Cuban American land and body artist, garners recognition that threatens the ego of her older, more famous husband, white minimalist sculptor Jack Martin. The story then shifts to Raquel Toro, whose working-class, Puerto Rican background makes her feel out of place among the “Art History Girls” who easily chat with professors and vacation in Europe. Nonetheless, in the spring of 1998, Raquel wins a prestigious summer fellowship at the Rhode Island School of Design, and her faculty adviser is enthusiastic about her thesis on Jack Martin, even if she’s not. Soon she’s enjoying the attentions of Nick Fitzsimmons, a well-connected, upper-crust senior. As Raquel’s story progresses, Anita’s first-person narrative acquires a supernatural twist following the night she falls from the window of their apartment —“jumped? or, could it be, pushed?”—but it’s grimly realistic in its exploration of her toxic relationship with Jack. (A dedication, “In memory of Ana,” flags the notorious case of sculptor Carl Andre, tried and acquitted for the murder of his wife, artist Ana Mendieta.) Raquel’s affair with Nick mirrors that unequal dynamic when she adapts her schedule and appearance to his whims, neglecting her friends and her family in Brooklyn. Gonzalez, herself a Brown graduate, brilliantly captures the daily slights endured by someone perceived as Other, from microaggressions (Raquel’s adviser refers to her as “Mexican”) to brutally racist behavior by the Art History Girls. While a vividly rendered supporting cast urges Raquel to be true to herself and her roots, her research on Martin leads to Anita’s art and the realization that she belongs to a tradition that’s been erased from mainstream art history.
An uncompromising message, delivered via a gripping story with two engaging heroines.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781250786210
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A touching portrait of courage and friendship.
A lifetime of friendship endures many upheavals.
Ellie and Homa, two young girls growing up in Tehran, meet at school in the early 1950s. Though their families are very different, they become close friends. After the death of Ellie’s father, she and her difficult mother must adapt to their reduced circumstances. Homa’s more warm and loving family lives a more financially constrained life, and her father, a communist, is politically active—to his own detriment and that of his family’s welfare. When Ellie’s mother remarries and she and Ellie relocate to a more exclusive part of the city, the girls become separated. They reunite years later when Homa is admitted to Ellie’s elite high school. Now a political firebrand with aspirations to become a judge and improve the rights of women in her factionalized homeland, Homa works toward scholastic success and begins practicing political activism. Ellie follows a course, plotted originally by her mother, toward marriage. The tortuous path of the girls’ adult friendship over the following decades is played out against regime change, political persecution, and devastating loss. Ellie’s well-intentioned but naïve approach stands in stark contrast to Homa’s commitment to human rights, particularly for women, and her willingness to risk personal safety to secure those rights. As narrated by Ellie, the girls’ story incorporates frequent references to Iranian food, customs, and beliefs common in the years of tumult and reforms accompanying the Iranian Revolution. Themes of jealousy—even in close friendships—and the role of the shir zan, the courageous “lion women” of Iran who effect change, recur through the narrative. The heartaches associated with emigration are explored along with issues of personal sacrifice for the sake of the greater good (no matter how remote it may seem).
A touching portrait of courage and friendship.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781668036587
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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