Calabria, 1960. Francesca Loftfield, a twenty-seven-year-old starry-eyed American, arrives in the isolated mountain village of Santa Chionia tasked with opening a nursery school. There is no road, no doctor, no running water or electricity. And thanks to a recent flood that swept away the post office, there's no mail, either. Most troubling, though, is the human skeleton that surfaced after the flood waters receded. Who is it? And why don't the police come and investigate? When an old woman begs Francesca to help determine if the remains are those of her long-missing son, Francesca begins to ask a lot of inconvenient questions.
Deeply compelling, well-crafted ... Yet the literary heart of this brilliant novel, its probing meditations on class, power, and the inevitability of crime, is rendered with the same nuance and intensity as Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet.
Captivating ... The novel feints at being a thriller, but is more consistently the coming-of-age story of a nosy, idealistic and arrogant young woman with a well-meaning savior complex ... She's no antihero, but she isn't always easy to root for, either, particularly as the novel barrels toward its mostly predictable conclusion. While Grames' protagonist is slow to learn, her story has plenty to teach about the potential pitfalls of good intentions and the fictional Santa Chionia is an enchanting destination.
