Convincing historical fiction with a spiritual slant.
A sequel dramatizes the conflict between fascism and its opponents in Italy and North Africa.
In 1938, Giovanni and Susanna Martellino’s vineyard is foundering, and Alfredo Obizzi, her former lover and a prominent Fascist legislator, gets revenge by blocking potential loans. Isabella Carollo, the wife of the couple’s winemaker and the series’ spiritual guru, encourages Susanna to ask her sister and brother-in-law for assistance. They agree to fund the vineyard—if the Martellinos will hide Jewish refugees. In the nearly eight years that follow, the events that befall these two central families reveal the breadth of Italy’s reach and the variety of World War II experiences. The Martellinos’ son, DeAngelo, travels to Benghazi, Libya, to compare techniques at the Romero family’s vineyard. The Romeros praise Il Duce’s modernization of North Africa, but DeAngelo points out that Mussolini’s latest manifesto has robbed Jews of their jobs and property. When the war heats up, DeAngelo helps Italian families escape Libya and later joins the Resistance. Meanwhile, his half brother, Pietro, Susanna’s son by Obizzi, is engaged in trench warfare in Albania and suffers temporary amnesia after a mortar attack. Back home, Susanna and Isabella volunteer at a prison hospital. In a touching second-generation romance, DeAngelo falls for Isabella’s daughter, Lily. As the Nazis ramp up their campaign against the Italian partisans, the stage is set for a gripping finale and a twist ending. Once again, Physioc (The Walls of Lucca, 2018), an Emmy Award–winning sportscaster for the Kansas City Royals and Fox College Basketball, brings wartime Italy to vibrant life. With the Libya material, he adds a layer of interest, bravely tackling colonialism alongside the many other social issues. The book languishes in the middle and could stand to lose 100 pages, but a pacey final third makes up for it. Isabella remains a mostly credible spokeswoman for mindfulness and forgiveness (as in The Walls of Lucca): “Enjoy right now” and “Don’t give anyone power over your thoughts. Don’t let the Fascists…or anyone take your peace.”
Convincing historical fiction with a spiritual slant.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-79312-876-8
Page Count: 471
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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