...readers who appreciate narratives driven by vivid characterization and family secrets will find much to enjoy here. While the pacing is a bit meandering at times, readers’ patience is richly rewarded in this assured debut, which marks Grames as an author to watch.
[An] entrancing multigenerational family saga ... Grames’ debut will find broad appeal as both an illuminating historical saga and a vivid portrait of a strong woman struggling to break free from the confines of her gender.
[A] vivid and moving debut ... Grames keeps the spotlight on stubborn, independent, and frequently unhappy Stella, while developing a large cast of believably complicated supporting characters ... Grames explores not just the immigrant experience but the stages of a woman’s life. This is a sharp and richly satisfying novel.
Backboned by a familiar immigration narrative, the novel follows Stella through her near-death experiences from southern Italy to suburban Connecticut, revealing a woman who, to her family’s frustration, has always been fiercely headstrong and independent ... Her resistance to being 'mastered' permeates the story ... Ironically, though, the novel itself is in some ways an act of mastery. It’s a chronicle of Stella’s life that is mediated and controlled by the narrator, who not only bookends Stella’s saga with present-day scenes, but also occasionally inserts herself into the story to offer commentary or flash forward ... The novel reads like a fable, its language often formal and overdramatized, as if to convey a sense of timelessness ...the novel’s focus on establishing meaning for Stella’s life—and, moreover, for the narrator’s—comes to outweigh its stated goal of reclaiming the older woman’s reputation.
... it’s a familiar story; commonplace, even. Hundreds of thousands of people might sketch similar details and timeline from their own ancestry ... An awkward early section attempts to graft magical realism onto a book that is, instead, magically real ... achieves what no sweeping history lesson about American immigrants could: It brings to life a woman that time and history would have ignored. That doesn’t quite split the world open, but it creates a big enough fissure to let the light in.
[Grames] launches it in a stale magic-realist tone that soon gives way to a harder-edged and much more compelling look at women’s lives in a patriarchal society ... The rush of events muddies the narrative focus, and the purpose of the epilogue is equally fuzzy ... Messily executed, but the author’s emotional commitment to her material makes it compelling.
