ISLAND OF MYTHS

Sodaro’s novel chronicles the lives of four Sicilian siblings forced to leave Italy by the Mafia.

Salvatore Troiano was born in Sicily in 1943, during a time when the city was being pummeled by Allied bombs; still, he remembers the first seven years of his life idyllically, full of love and family togetherness with his parents, brother, and two sisters. His father, Anteo, is a willful man who defiantly stands up to both the fascists and the Mafia, but his independence brings ruin to the family—Salvatore’s grandfather is murdered by assassins who answer to Calvo Lucco, a local gangster. Then, his mother, Demetra, is kidnapped, and Anteo and his four children are expelled from their home and forced to leave for America in 1951. Anteo is murdered by Mafia assassins in New York. Salvatore is adopted by Uncle Max and Aunt Freddie and rechristened Salvatore Garazzo. Though he struggles to “salvage as much as possible from my Sicilian origins,” he can’t help but lose some grip on his ancestral identity. The siblings are broken up: Odisseo, Salvatore’s younger brother, is raised in Hong Kong by a Chinese father and Russian mother and renamed Alexander John Huang. Elena becomes Cora Freeman and is raised by a Black couple in Washington, D.C., and Ginestra becomes Rebecca Aaronsohn and grows up on a kibbutz in Israel. In this sprawling novel, as historically fascinating as it is dramatically immersive, the scattered children grapple with the trauma of their fractured lives and surrendered identities—still not completely safe from the Mafia that robbed them of their parents. This is an impressively complex tale (though never gratuitously so) that seamlessly weaves the poignant personal drama of the Troiano family into the political tumult of the century. Sodaro’s writing is emotionally unabashed, but not at the expense of subtlety, nor at the cost of sentimentality. This is a captivating work of fiction, both moving and intellectually challenging.

A mesmerizing novel as historically astute as it is gripping.