Love, pain, and nearly magical meatballs make the story of Bella Donato a delightful read.
An Italian American teenager in 1930s Coney Island loses one family but gains another in Ciminello’s hyperkinetic coming-of-age tale.
An “absolutely, positively, practically, almost-true story,” as the author refers to it, this narrative centers on Belladonna Marie Donato (Bella, to her close friends and family), the whirlwind heart of the Donato family. Fierce, intelligent, blessed with what her first mentor in the cooking arts calls “the Cooking Spirit” and (eventually) a bombshell appearance, at 6 years old, Bella is the type of girl who feels free to bite the nuns who try to change her name. As Bella enters her teens, she discovers sex, which she embraces with gusto, quickly becoming pregnant by Francis Anthony Mozzarelli, a man whose beauty serves as inspiration for a painting of Jesus and a source of longing for his gay buddy, Terelli Lombardi. After Bella delivers a baby boy, her father, Manny, has her sterilized and delivers the infant to an orphanage. These events begin a voyage of self-discovery as Bella searches to fill the void of the family she loses while finding circus folk, a warm-hearted priest, a mobbed-up boss with a deeply hidden secret, and any number of other misfits and outcasts along the way. Ciminello doesn’t bother with realism, telling his tale with vivid, irrepressible language seasoned with plenty of profanity and earthy sexuality. While there aren’t any truly supernatural events, frequent calls to the Cooking Spirit and references to ghosts and hearing voices come close enough to magical realism to make the difference academic. The energy and emotional pitch of the story start high and never let up, but Ciminello settles into a groove after a few chapters, allowing the pathos of Bella’s life to develop in relatable ways. As a bonus, the copious recipes included provide a taste of the Cooking Spirit she exemplifies.
Love, pain, and nearly magical meatballs make the story of Bella Donato a delightful read.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781942436614
Page Count: 470
Publisher: Forest Avenue Press
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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