Convincing historical fiction with a spiritual slant.
A sequel dramatizes the conflict between fascism and its opponents in Italy and North Africa.
In 1938, Giovanni and Susanna Martellino’s vineyard is foundering, and Alfredo Obizzi, her former lover and a prominent Fascist legislator, gets revenge by blocking potential loans. Isabella Carollo, the wife of the couple’s winemaker and the series’ spiritual guru, encourages Susanna to ask her sister and brother-in-law for assistance. They agree to fund the vineyard—if the Martellinos will hide Jewish refugees. In the nearly eight years that follow, the events that befall these two central families reveal the breadth of Italy’s reach and the variety of World War II experiences. The Martellinos’ son, DeAngelo, travels to Benghazi, Libya, to compare techniques at the Romero family’s vineyard. The Romeros praise Il Duce’s modernization of North Africa, but DeAngelo points out that Mussolini’s latest manifesto has robbed Jews of their jobs and property. When the war heats up, DeAngelo helps Italian families escape Libya and later joins the Resistance. Meanwhile, his half brother, Pietro, Susanna’s son by Obizzi, is engaged in trench warfare in Albania and suffers temporary amnesia after a mortar attack. Back home, Susanna and Isabella volunteer at a prison hospital. In a touching second-generation romance, DeAngelo falls for Isabella’s daughter, Lily. As the Nazis ramp up their campaign against the Italian partisans, the stage is set for a gripping finale and a twist ending. Once again, Physioc (The Walls of Lucca, 2018), an Emmy Award–winning sportscaster for the Kansas City Royals and Fox College Basketball, brings wartime Italy to vibrant life. With the Libya material, he adds a layer of interest, bravely tackling colonialism alongside the many other social issues. The book languishes in the middle and could stand to lose 100 pages, but a pacey final third makes up for it. Isabella remains a mostly credible spokeswoman for mindfulness and forgiveness (as in The Walls of Lucca): “Enjoy right now” and “Don’t give anyone power over your thoughts. Don’t let the Fascists…or anyone take your peace.”
Convincing historical fiction with a spiritual slant.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-79312-876-8
Page Count: 471
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 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.
