Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
This sequel to the well-received The Book of Saints again follows the Innocente family, here having left Italy to settle in a Canadian farming community called Mersea on the shores of Lake Erie. Unlike the previous novel, however, this one has only mixed success. The tale is nicely wrought and lovingly written, but it suffers from a thin plot and a morass of self-analysis from its narrator, Vittorio. In 1961, when the novel opens, Vittorio is seven; he and his illegitimate half-sister, Rita, have joined Vittorio's moody father, a greenhouse keeper, who hates the infant Rita because she reminds him of his faithless wife. Vittorio hopes desperately to make a connection with his father, who only withdraws further, living at such a remove from his surroundings that he rarely speaks even to his children. Vittorio's attempts to connect elsewhere, either in Mersea's Italian community or in the surrounding Canadian culture, meet with rejection or misunderstanding. Yet he slowly navigates through the elements of his life, gaining perspective, finding a girlfriend, attending college and traveling to Africa. Rita finally escapes from the family with an awful ruse, better left unrevealed. In places, Ricci tells his tale beautifully, but he seems to have fallen under the spell of his own prose, which, like the protagonist, turns in upon itself a little too deeply.
Library Journal
In this sequel to The Book of the Saints, young Vittorio Innocente leaves Italy and his dead mother to join his estranged father in Canada. But the shame of his mother's adulterous affair and subsequent death in childbirth poisons life with his embittered father. Emotions explode when his Aunt Theresa arrives with his baby half-sister, Rita, but then like the vegetables they labor to grow under acres of glass in a hostile climate, the Innocentes struggle to fashion a family from the wreckage of dashed hopes. Caught between his father's dark fury and his aloof half-sister, Vittorio struggles to escape the hothouse environment of an immigrant community isolated by custom and language. Ricci adroitly portrays the developing awareness of a child growing into adulthood whose emotional scars barely heal before they are ripped open by fresh revelations. Through Vittorio's brooding sensitivity, Ricci explores what binds these volatile characters into a family as well as what ultimately drives them apart. Recommended for all collections. -- Paul E. Hutchison, Bellefonte, Pennsylvania
From the Publisher
The exactitude and delicacy with which the smallest details, the finest nuances, are rendered, demonstrates Ricci’s mastery as a colourist of the human heart.…A dizzying display of virtuosity.…”
–Quill & Quire (starred review)
“A haunting, lyrical, intelligent coming-of-age novel…the acuity of its observations, the eloquence of its prose and the hard-earned wisdom of its final pages make it a genuine achievement.”
–New York Times
“Ricci’s great gift is to capture, sometimes in exquisite prose, the texture of people and place.…”
–Maclean’s
“Brilliant.…There is little doubt that Nino Ricci is one of Canada’s best novelists to appear in a long time.”
–The Spectator (U.K.)
