The injustice here has an immediacy; the tale itself feels part of legend.
An Italian family goes from poverty to prosperity and then to infamy in this brisk account of the persecution the Mafia brought to 1920s Italy, based on a true story.
Luigi Sacco is a day laborer in rural Raffadali who, by dint of his brains, hard work, and wish to make a family with the woman he loves, becomes a prosperous landowner with a large family. The Saccos are socialists, so all their advancements are done with an eye toward bettering the lots of those around them. When his son, Giovanni, sees a way to make a profit by replacing the horse-drawn cart that provides the only transportation to the provincial capital with a bus, he goes into partnership with the driver of the cart so as not to put him out of a job. It's not the Saccos' politics that the local Mafia can't abide so much as the money the family is making. Luigi's refusal to accede to extortion results in a decadeslong war, with family members dying, sons having to live as outlaws, and the dissipation of the Saccos' fortune. The local law is of no help, as the Mafia controls the police, judges, and the outcomes of most trials. The story reads like a researched version of a folk legend handed down over generations. The people are not fully developed characters as much as figures standing in for their fates—which is not a criticism but exactly what is to be expected when a story is told in this way. That doesn't keep the reader from longing for a bit more dramatization or, at least, the audiobook, where the right narrator could give this appalling and tragic story the fabulist element it needs.
The injustice here has an immediacy; the tale itself feels part of legend.Pub Date: July 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-60945-423-4
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
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