An engrossing story about a young woman taking chances to find her way after college.
A young woman follows her dreams against the backdrops of Sicily and San Francisco in Constantino’s novel.
Mariella Russo has just finished her undergraduate degree at the University of Catania in 2000. She’s lived her whole life in the Sicilian town, feeling trapped by tradition and expectations. Her volatile mother expects Mariella to marry her boyfriend Matteo, the scion of the wealthy Gamberini family, coveting the elevated social standing the match will bestow upon the Russos. Although she loves Matteo, Mariella does not want to get married, feeling that they are both “caught in the same snare of family and tradition.” Her beloved grandmother, Nonna Giuseppina, understands her restlessness, saying, “If you remain here, they’ll never leave you alone.” After a disastrous graduation party (during which she publicly defies everyone’s plans for her), Mariella secretly escapes to America. Helped by Nonna and Luisa, the owner of the travel agency where Mariella works, she is admitted to graduate school at San Francisco State University. She arrives in San Francisco to find that her roommate, Leslie, is a gay man; he becomes a good friend. Through his connections, she lands a job as a part-time hostess at a high-end Italian restaurant in North Beach. The restaurant staff provides companionship and a romantic relationship with Giovanni, the restaurant owner, who is substantially older than her. A dramatic appearance by Mamma in a bid to bring her home causes Mariella to re-examine her actions and relationships. In her debut novel, Constantino has created a forthright and bold character who owns up to her faults and grows as she matures. Mariella’s choices are skillfully put in perspective in the contexts of the Sicilian and San Francisco communities she lives in and in the backstories of Nonna, who defied tradition in the 1940s by following her heart, and Giovanni, whose unhappy marriage shows that following expectations does not always result in happiness. Readers will easily relate to this enjoyable and honest depiction of the conflicting desires and expectations faced by many people in their 20s.
An engrossing story about a young woman taking chances to find her way after college.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781647427689
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 26, 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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