Reviewed by Fran Hawthorne
Posted on: February 8, 2024
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From the very first pages, this beautiful novel weaves closely observed details of cooking, sewing, and the love-hate struggles of four generations of an Italian-American family into patterns as intricate as the lace wedding veils hand-made by the family’s matriarchs.
A young man in a rural Italian town, brain-damaged by poison gas in World War I, taps his fingers in endless time-keeping. A generation later, his niece’s aging husband in America, ravaged by stroke, will also tap his fingers in meaningless rhythms.
In Italy, Anna watches the ashes drop from her father’s cigarettes as he sews men’s suits out of fine gabardine and wool. In Philadelphia, Anna’s daughter will watch her father do the same.
Two of the book’s mother-daughter pairs repeat the Rosary (itself a pattern) together as they climb the 14 Stations of the Cross to a mountainside shrine in southern Italy. In both cases, the mother is far more devout, almost dragging her daughter with her.
The basic story follows an age-old pattern of immigration: Vincenzo, suffering postwar survivor’s guilt in Italy, sails to America promising to send for his brand-new wife, Anna, as soon as he can make enough money working in his brother’s tailor shop. This takes far longer than expected, and by the time Anna arrives in the US, the couple are far different from the innocent newlyweds they’d last been together. Their American-born daughter, Rose, rejects some of her mother’s traditions but fewer than she thinks she does. Rose’s eldest daughter, Kate, sheds more.
Through the nearly 100 years covered by the novel, the family experiences deaths of all sorts and at all ages, plus adultery, unplanned pregnancies, failed pregnancies, the Great Depression, and more. They almost but don’t quite break with the Catholic Church’s teachings on divorce, abortion, and homosexuality. They wonder if they really love one another.
The book is told in 14 linked stories of starkly different lengths, alternating among the points of view of Anna, Vincenzo, Rose, and Kate. Each of these stories stands on its own, yet they are unbreakably interwoven.
The descriptions are extraordinarily vivid. Every step of Anna’s lace-making is shown so precisely that I feel—not as if I could make the lace myself, but even more realistically, that this work is so complicated that I could never do it. And when author Cynthia Reeves describes women making a “sheep’s milk pie dotted with shaved chocolate and candied orange peel” and “fried caggionetti oozing with chocolate-almond filling,” well, I’m ready to jump into those pages and grab a bite!
The only major flaw is the character of Anna’s mother, who is so unlikable, without any redeeming actions or qualities, that she becomes a cartoon villain.
But over all, this is a vividly written and skillfully crafted novel.
