An engaging and readable work of women’s fiction set in contemporary Florence.
An American woman searches for her mother—and herself—in Florence in this novel.
Author Lyn Bennet is off to spend a month in Florence as part of an annual writers’ seminar, though her journey is dampened by the last-minute news that her husband, Stan, won’t be joining her due to a “big deal at the office.” As a result, she’s forced to celebrate her 35th birthday alone. Her trip this year has extra significance because she’s working on a book about her recently deceased mother, Jennifer, who came to Florence as one of the Mud Angels in 1966 to help salvage the city’s works of art following the destructive flooding of the Arno. Armed with her mother’s journal, Lyn wishes to find someone who would have worked with her back then in order to fill in the gaps in the story. She meets Matteo by chance when the Florentine happens to find and return Lyn’s scarf. He works as one of the acquisition directors at the Uffizi, and Lyn is instantly enamored of him. Matteo is working to cement his father’s legacy by securing a specific—though mysterious—piece for the museum. Soon, Stan arrives in Florence, but not with good news. He and his wife’s best friend, Susie, have both come to tell the author about the affair they’ve been having—a devastating revelation that ruins Lyn’s two closest relationships. “Love is selfish,” Stan tells her glibly. “You know that. You fall in love. It’s about seizing it. It’s just—you know you gotta seize it. No one wants to hurt anyone.” With her life crumbling around her, Lyn has no choice but to dig deeper into her project; the writings of her colorful group of students; and the beauty of Florence itself, which her mother worked so hard to preserve. Selbo’s (Dreams of Discovery, 2018, etc.) prose is breezy, and she takes great pleasure in describing the picturesque features of the book’s eponymous city: “Soon the street opens into the Piazza di San Lorenzo and there’s the basilica, standing grand and venerable. Technically it’s incomplete—because Michelangelo’s design for a Carrara marble façade was never realized. I always marvel at how gorgeous I find it; its unfinished rawness.” Her characters are well-drawn—particularly the goofs that Lyn instructs as part of the writing seminar—though they do slip occasionally into clichés. Matteo has a bit of the flatness of a fantasy partner, saying things like “We Italians cherish the past. It is still alive with us. Americans are always busy with the present.” The author does an admirable job weaving in the artistic history of Florence, especially the tragic flood that almost erased so much of it. Novels like this one peddle a bit in escapism. But Lyn and Jennifer help to convince readers that Florence isn’t simply a beautiful place to run away to, but also a fragile place that must be cherished—akin, perhaps, to the human heart.
An engaging and readable work of women’s fiction set in contemporary Florence.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-950627-23-3
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Pandamoon Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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