Antonio's Wife - Jacqueline DeJohn

A first time novelist pens a story with its roots firmly in the author's past - a story of immigration from Italy to the rough tenements of New York City, a story of arranged marriages, social norms so strict that the sins of the parents are firmly passed on to their innocent children, a story about different kinds of love. This sounds like an opera, yes? Well, there's opera all wrapped up in this complex tale too.

Jacqueline DeJohn has penned an emotional tale based on the mysterious details of her grandmother's passage to America from the hills above Naples. Her main character, Mina/Maria Grazia comes to America as a mail-order bride. Settled in the tenements and new to a marriage that she hoped would bring happiness and escape from her 'past life', Maria becomes a seamstress for an opera company in Manhattan. Her marriage deteriorates around her into a frightening and abusive calamity and she pins her hopes on saving pennies from her pay to escape this second traumatic chapter of her young life. It is at this moment in life when Francesca Frascatti, a renowned Italian diva comes to the opera house to sing Tosca. This flamboyant singer needs a dresser and Mina is given the job. The story line takes a dramatic and operatic turn at this point and never stops careening toward a passionate, murderous, emotional, and yes, operatic, finish.

This novel, while dramatic and over-the-top coincidental, meshes together the characters, details of the history of New York City geography, famous names from the early 1900's, and the general themes of ethnic discrimination, immigration, the development of 'the Black Hand' aka Mafia, issues of women's rights, the history and development of opera as entertainment in America, the politics of Tammany Hall, and the development of crime investigation techniques. It's full to brimming ... like a good opera with an ending that takes a great deal of finagling to reach ... like a good opera.

City of Dreams - Beverly Swerling

I love it when I discover a new author, one that I know I will enjoy, one that will make me search out all the published titles, and hang on, waiting for new works. Beverly Swerling is my newest find. It's not like she hasn't been around for a while. Her first novel appeared back in 2001 ... and what a place to start!

The settlement of New Amsterdam was a commercial venture right from the start and with commerce came the wealthy looking to become more wealthy, the adventurers who would explore the new ways of life , the moral and the amoral, the poor looking to better themselves, and all stripes in between. Swerling writes a novel that brings the reader to New Amsterdam through the experiences of Lucas Turner and his sister, Sally. Lucas is a barber and surgeon newly arrived from Rotterdam, Sally is his apothecary assistant. Together, the two hope to make their way in the New World, where the need for competent surgeons is constant.

Lucas and Sally reflect the beginnings of a move within medicine - a time when herbs and simples were becoming better understood, when the concepts of blood transfusion, the practice of sterilization of instruments and bandages was becoming known, but still little understood, when anatomy was still a mystery to some physicians, but slowly becoming known to surgeons, when there was a great deal of consternation about new practices that might be considered unnatural, evil, and even smacking of witchcraft. Lucas and Sally fight ignorance and share their skills in order to make a living. The story follows their settlement and subsequent marriages before turning to their progeny and the further development of the city, as it becomes a colony of the British and is re-named New York ... and so it goes. The book is written in sections labelled Book I, II, III, etc. that cut across the years between 1664 and 1798. Each era deals with members of the Turner or Van der Vries (Sally's married name) families, the further development of the medical field through their experiences, and the development of New York City and the colonial expansion of Manhattan and the environs.

Swerling has done an incredible job of researching and developing her story - rather, stories. It's a saga ... and a good one, indeed. At no time does she compromise the good story to become too didactic about the history and vice versa. The history is never compromised to build the story. She has gone on to write three more books in what has become known as her City of Dreams series. They bring the development of the city up through the Gilded Age and are all meticulously researched as well as having meaty fictional story lines set within the framework of the urban history.

I look forward to finding more of Swerling's books and am thinking of reading them in the order that she published, which means that the next book I'll dig around for will be her novel called Shadowbrook.

The Fortress of Solitude - Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem's book about young Dylan Ebdus and his life-long friendship with Mingus Rude made be cringe, shudder, shake my head in wonder, and finally, sigh in resignation. The book is touted to be a 'fictionalized autobiography' of Lethem's years growing up in Brooklyn during the first throes of 'gentrification'. It is a relentless slog through a childhood lived from the apartment door through the gauntlet of the streets to  'P.S. # Whatever' by a nerdy little white boy with a half-cocked mother and a nerdy little white boy artist of a father ... poor kid. He gets a world class introduction to the art and music of the era, but lacks any real family connections that extend beyond the apartment walls. To boot, his mother abandons the family while Dylan is still a young kid, leaving his detached father to raise him ... or let him survive among the other detached souls in Gowanus. Dylan builds his fortress of solitude year after year, developing a keen mind and an alleycat's instinct for survival. He becomes a social chameleon.

Consequently, young Dylan observes the goings-on in his neighborhood - the young kids making their way on the sidewalks and in the alleys, playing ball, learning the fine art of tagging, forming alliances that will translate into neighborhood gangs when they are older, dodging the drunks and the druggies, and surviving until they can escape the neighborhood or carve their own turf within its boundaries. Dylan meets Mingus and together, they form an alliance of sorts based on comic book heroes, music, and the basic prurient interests of young boys. Their teen years become a laboratory of artistic experimentation in the development of their 'tag identities', sexual and drug experimentation, and slowly negotiating their future tracks.

I know this is a 'smart book'. It's well-written. It's edgy with its constant referral to the art and music and atmosphere of NYC and its environs during the emergence of soul, disco, punk, and the alternative art scene. It is heavy with local color, the various political initiatives of New York politicos, and name-dropping, the story moves along and my heart aches for Dylan and Mingus and their crony, Arthur. It's everything that a young urban writer might want to put down on paper, but it left me sad and lonely and bereft and thinking of that old spiritual called 'Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child' ... perhaps that was Lethem's point?

Guess I'll go back to a light read after this one ...