THE GODMOTHERS

When Nicole’s husband needs a background check to secure a job in Jimmy Carter’s administration, she asks her godmother if there are any family secrets to worry about. It’s a question she may regret asking.

Setting her tale mostly in the 1930s and '40s, Aubray uses the dramatic changes in America to highlight the family drama—a saga reminiscent of Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola. Unlike them, though, Aubray focuses on the challenges particular to women, including their parents' preference for sons, the dangers of extramarital sex, and the difficulties of assuming power in a patriarchal world, particularly the Mafia-ruled world of mid-20th-century New York. At times, Aubray lapses into exposition and cliché, yet the narrative moves fast and furious. Nicole and her cousins actually have four godmothers, four sisters-in-law who each have colorful stories that might give the FBI pause. Filomena has lived under an assumed name since she arrived in New York at age 17 to marry Mario, the youngest brother in the family. Hers is a story of escaping World War II Italy after her cousin dies in her arms. Mario’s older brothers, Frankie and Johnny, marry Lucy (a nurse and single mother who must conceal her son’s biological parentage) and Amie (a shy woman who must violently escape her first husband’s daily assaults), respectively. All three wives carefully honor Gianni and Tessa, the patriarch and matriarch of the family—a family that deftly manipulates crime lords. Petrina, their only daughter, longs to escape the dynasty by marrying into a WASPy family. As violence erupts, power shifts, and war rises once again, the four women learn to negotiate power on their own terms.

A fast-paced, drama-filled portrait of a family dynasty.