This story begins when a mother and her daughter take off on a trip. It is a summer of rapidly changing winds, volcanic rumbles, and sudden tempests. They’ve landed in Sicily, near the ancient ruins where the mother’s grandmother worked long ago on an archaeological dig. The narrator’s marriage has collapsed, her mother is losing her memory, and her daughter is on the threshold of adolescence, starting to ask difficult questions and form complex memories. How do you begin again? the narrator wonders, pondering her family line. How do you begin again if you got the beginning wrong?
Intriguing and accomplished ... Sustains a vital idea: storytellers who sustain and create collaborative knowledge defend themselves from and sometimes vanquish the violence and danger that necessitate flight.
With photographs and old postcards enriching this rhapsodic tale of beauty and terror, Luiselli contemplates questions of home, inheritance, time, mythology, metamorphosis, injustice, our impact on nature.
Arresting and layered ... Luiselli makes reference to ancient Greek and Roman mythology, which adds depth to her profound portrait of the relationship between mother and daughter as they navigate the new shape of their family and try to understand each other. It’s a masterpiece.
