THE LOST BOY OF SANTA CHIONIA

An idealistic American gets educated about Italian realities in a remote Calabrian village.

Francesca Loftfield is 27, “a bluestocking with big dreams for building a better world, one needy child at a time,” when she arrives in Santa Chionia in 1960 to open a nursery school for an international charity. She has fled a disintegrating marriage, alluding to it intermittently before she finally explains how it came apart to Cicca Casile, her grumpy landlady. Cicca warns Francesca that it’s dangerous to search for the identity of the skeleton uncovered beneath the rubble of the post office, which was destroyed in a flood that also wiped out the single bridge connecting the village to the outside world. But Francesca’s curiosity is piqued when not one but two women claim the skeleton belongs to a loved one who allegedly emigrated to America but was actually killed by “them.” As Francesca delves into the stories of Leo Romeo and Mico Scordo, she faces increasing hostility from town authorities and eventually realizes there’s a lot going on in Santa Chionia that she doesn’t understand. Complicating matters is the arrival of Ugo, a handsome village boy who is home from his job in Milan to help with his dying father and openly taken with the American visitor. The tangled plot becomes more so when Francesca decides there’s a third possible identity for that skeleton, and the final revelations would be more compelling if she were a more engaging narrator. The amount of time she spends agonizing over her not-yet-ex-husband becomes irritating, as does her cluelessness about a major character she continues to trust long after readers have seen multiple glaring clues that he’s in on all the dirty deeds. Despite some wonderfully rendered portraits of individual villagers and vivid descriptions of the Calabrian landscape, the novel never quite clicks.

Stronger on atmosphere than plot and narrative focus.