From Publishers Weekly
The morning after her 70th birthday party, attended by her dutiful husband and children, Adriana Rundel takes a commuter train from suburban New Jersey to Manhattan, and becomes lost in memories of her WWII girlhood [...] in hiding on the Italian isle of Elba. Stealing glances from her hideout in the cupboard, she finds her first love, a young AWOL Senegalese soldier named Amdu Diop, who takes refuge in her family's home during the Allied push toward liberation. He is 17; she is 10. Theirs is an innocent infatuation rather than an intense affair, but that seems to be precisely what Scott (
The Manikin) is after: "The truth was she liked Amdu because he was perfectly alive.... She just felt it, the way she felt the warmth of the sun." Their attachment is lovely, but doesn't provide much dramatic lift. And the heart attack Adriana suffers on the train ride into the city, which intermingles her childhood panic with her later-life mortal fear, is less a plot device than a means for integrating the vivid past with the dull present. Still, Scott accomplishes large shifts in time and perspective with grace, and delivers an affecting, unsentimental portrait of a survivor taking stock of her life and loves.
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Returning to Elba, an island off the Tuscany coast, also the setting for her earlier
Tourmaline (2002), Scott deftly whisks readers back in time to a cupboard in which Adriana Nardi silently hides from a new wave of invaders during World War II. It's clear from the beginning that this is a book to be savored line by line, as Adriana's stream-of-consciousness narration reveals her childish perspective on the nightmare of war and her relatives' infighting, as well as her first experience with love and compassion. Every scene contains emotionally charged images, from the brutal death of a girl raped by African soldiers to the miracles performed out of kindness by the wounded Senegalese boy Amdu. Writing in a lyrical, sometimes surreal style, Scott employs the same flashback techniques honed in her previous novels to juggle between Adriana in the present--age 70, suspended between breaths, possibly dying--and Adriana in the past, reliving a distant time when a stranger saved her life. A rich, multilayered literary novel.
Jennifer BakerCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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