This is the second book in the Nino Ricci trilogy which began with “Lives of the Saints”. After travelling from Italy, Vitto and his baby sister arrive in Canada to begin life in Mersea, a farming community of transplanted Italians in Southwestern Ontario. Vitto hardly knows his father Mario, ...
I have clicked four stars, but to me, this final book in The Lives of the Saints trilogy deserves 3 ½ stars. Where She Has Gone is better than In a Glass House, but not as good as the first, Lives of the Saints. It took me a long time to read this book, especially during the sagging middle, where...
This was Ricci’s first novel, published in 1990. It is the story of Vittorio Innocente, told in his words in three novels of which this is the first. When we meet Vitto, he is a seven year old boy living in the small Italian village of Valle del Sol with his wildly independent mother Christina an...
What is the trigger, what switch opens the floodgate? If he could find it, he could control it. But even to think of the urge is to bring it on. “Dad. Dad!” These are the times it overtakes him: When he is reading. When he is watching. When he is listening. At the crossroads of action and thought...
He’d had a chance by then to review most of his major life decisions, then to regret them, then to not care one way or the other; he’d had a chance to resolve to change in every possible way that could make any difference and then to admit that he’d never change, that he didn’t even want to, that...
He had come in out of the desert, people said—from the look of him, his blistered face and the way his skin hung from his bones, he’d passed a good while there. He had set himself up now just off the square, squatting in the shade of an old fig tree; I had a good view of him from the porch of the...
One way is for each of us to look at ourselves through our society’s most remarkable figures. I’m not talking about hero worship or political iconography. That is a danger to be avoided at all costs. And yet people in every country do keep on going back to the most important people in their past....