Ventrella reveals the many ways in which the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons—and the daughters.
In the 1980s, a malacarne, or “bad seed,” grows up in a gritty neighborhood in the Italian city of Bari, on the Adriatic Coast, and seeks escape from the violence and mortifications she witnesses and endures there.
Maria De Santis, the spirited daughter of the mercurial Antonio and his browbeaten wife, Teresa, lives up to the “bad seed” designation bestowed upon her by her fisherman father, a Tony Curtis look-alike with a violent temper. Life in the poorest quarter of Bari provides Marí with few opportunities to indulge in wanderlust or satisfy her yearning for escape and recognition. A childhood alliance with the overweight and shunned Michele—another outsider with considerable family burdens of his own—provides Marí with a confidant and much-needed companion in adventure. Long-standing family rivalries and animosities (some based in reality, some in superstition) determine the course of Marí and Michele’s relationship in ways which are tragic, operatic, and soap operatic all at once. Marí’s violent family life mirrors the brutal reality of everyday life in the Bari underclass, but her struggle to escape her home, family, and city resembles the experiences of other young heroines as well. Ventrella’s narrative examines themes of class and gender expectations, accompanied by enough nostalgic detail to make the "old country" more appealing in memory than it was in reality. Inevitable comparisons of Ventrella’s work with that of Elena Ferrante—who also dissects the emotional experiences of young Italian women—will be propelled by Goldstein’s fluid translation of this novel in the wake of her work on Ferrante’s juggernaut. Ventrella's ambitious attempt to convey Marí's struggle echoes Ferrante's epic approach to chronicling women's lives, but, here, the action is played out on a smaller scale, over a shorter time, with fewer characters. Simmering violence and misogyny percolate beneath the surface of Marí’s story, but, really, everyone seems miserable and trapped in the net of poverty and deprivation Ventrella wraps around her characters.
Ventrella reveals the many ways in which the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons—and the daughters.Pub Date: June 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5420-0443-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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