A sensitive account of all-too-human characters who fled one oppressive island only to create another for themselves.
A curse and a vendetta follow two families from Sicily to Connecticut.
Rafalà’s debut comprises a triptych of novella-length sections, each narrated by a resident of Middletown, Connecticut’s Sicilian community. Overshadowing each story is the village of Melilli, Sicily, and its ancestral worship of the martyr St. Sebastian. Two families, the Vassallos and the Morellos, are descended from the original bearers who, centuries before, transported the statue of St. Sebastian to Melilli. David Marconi, a 13-year-old preparing for his confirmation in 1980s Middletown, does not learn that his true surname is Vassallo until he discovers a cache of mementos. He’s been bullied by classmate Tony Morello, and there are dark hints of a long-standing grudge between Rocco, Tony’s father, and David’s father, Salvatore. As David seeks to explain and perhaps end the feud, a tragedy ensues. Salvatore takes up the tale, revealing the cluster of incidents during World War II that caused the Vassallos to become personae non gratae in Melilli. The curse began with the accidental death of Salvatore’s twin brothers, who stumbled on unexploded American ordnance. Vincenzo, a Roman who fought for Mussolini, narrates the final section. His fate becomes intertwined with the Vassallos when he happens upon the family’s mountain hiding place and, later, when he rescues the orphaned Salvatore and his sister, Nella, and moves with them to America. The flowery prose of David’s section, replete with complex imagery, is more distracting than descriptive. Salvatore’s section as well as Vincenzo’s are told in more urgent and telegraphic language, perhaps in keeping with the more fraught times they are living through. David’s story, for all that it expresses his puzzlement over some generational strife to which he is not privy—by design, it would appear—never transcends the trite bullying plotline. As the Morello/Vassallo hostilities extend almost 50 years beyond the original provocation, we wonder why the combatants continue to inhabit the same Connecticut town. It’s a big country.
A sensitive account of all-too-human characters who fled one oppressive island only to create another for themselves.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-4297-0
Page Count: 398
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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