Viola Ardone's The Children's Train

Raising a child to a reasonably sane, functional adulthood has got to be the most difficult job in the world! The longer I live, the more I witness the disparities in prosperity that affect young families and their ability to feed, clothe, and educate their offspring, the more I have concluded that it is a remarkable leap of faith to procreate.

These thoughts were brought home to me this past weekend while I was reading  “The Children’s Train,” by Viola Ardone, a fictional take on an historical event that happened in Italy at the end of World War II. In southern Italy, Naples in particular, poverty and hunger are rampant. Amerigo and his friends steal food from the street vendors and scrounge for rags to sell. School is a distant dream. But members of the Communist party, in a bid for solidarity, have partnered with families in the more prosperous north, to temporarily take in the kids of Napoli, feed them back to health, send them to school, and treat them as if they were their own children.

Our narrator, Amerigo Speranza, is wise beyond his seven years. Unlike his friends, he doesn’t fall for the gossip that says the children are being sent to Russia to work. He just wants to be warm and maybe have a new pair of shoes and since his Mamma Antonietta is always complaining about having him underfoot in their two-room apartment, he embraces the train trip to Bologna and the new life that waits for him there.

Children are so smart, so intuitive. If they had only been told the truth from the beginning, that they would eventually be returning to their homes, that their parents sent them away for their health and well-being, that they were loved, there might have been less chance that they would not want to return. Looking at the world through Amerigo’s eyes we understand that he’s never felt cared for, that he has no idea who his father is, that his mother is likely depressed and barely functional after the death of her first born.

 Amerigo is ripe for the big, warm open house and arms of his benefactor, Derna, and her extended family, which includes Rivo and Luzio, two boys his own age. Their dad, Alcide, is the first male role model Amerigo has ever had, a man who encourages Amerigo in his love of music. The more he thrives, the more the world opens to him, full of possibilities, and the shabby apartment and the mother he is a bit ashamed of seem extremely far away.

Though Amerigo is a funny smart aleck whom one easily comes to love, this novel has a melancholy tone that is difficult to shake off. The language is simplistic, no flowery, languorous sentences from Ardone or her translator. What’s most interesting about it is the way the fallout from this social experiment impacted the various children as they grew up, the ones who returned and the ones who did not. I’ve tried to find some evidence of studies that may have been done by psychologists because I believe they would be fascinating but so far, no luck.

A famous poster from the Vietnam era tells us that “War is not healthy for children and other living things.” This book lends itself to a radical discussion of displacement during wartime and the trauma that parents suffer when faced with the ultimate sacrifice, to give up their children so that they might live.

Cherie Jones' How the One-Armed sister Sweeps Her House

Cherie Jones! https://cheriesueannjonesblog.wordpress.com/about/ Another debut novelist who knocks it out of the park on the first swing! “How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House” is simply dazzling, perhaps a strange term to describe a book about the long arc of domestic violence as it passes down through three generations. After Lala’s mom died, her grandmother Wilma grudgingly took her in but watched her like a hawk. All that scrutiny could not save Stella, who preferred to be called Lala, from pregnancy though, so she packs her bags and moves down the road to Adan’s one-room shack on Barbados’s Baxter’s Beach.

Lala had been a girl with dreams. She set up her hair braiding booth smack dab on the sand in front of the gorgeous high-rise, gated condominiums where wealthy Europeans relaxed for months at a time. She had a way with the women. Her sunny disposition and magic hands earned her a decent amount of money. She was saving to get away.

What drew her to Adan? Maybe the fact that he had ambitions too? But Adan didn’t work for the money he flaunted when he was flush. He had learned how to break and enter from his stepfather when he was only ten. In fact, he was robbing a home the night Lala went into labor. In pain and frightened she ran down the street to the first mansion with lights on and leaned on the bell. Lala heard the gunshot, then the scream, and somehow intuited that her life was about to drastically change.

Jones, a victim of abuse herself, must have found it deeply cathartic to write certain scenes. They are terrifying in their reality. Both Wilma and Stella exhibit that wariness and obsequiousness that plagues a woman who is physically or emotionally beaten down. Always trying to gauge the mood of the man, what might set him off, is exhausting. When the blow comes, no matter how many times it has been landed before, it is always a shock.

Every character in this amazing book has a deeply disturbing backstory. Jones is generous in sharing these with us, never making a judgment or an excuse. There are Peter and Mira, the victims of Adan’s latest B & E, and there’s Adan’s best friend and Stella’s first lover, Tone, damaged by a childhood trauma yet still able to love. Jones is psychologically astute when writing about the stages of grief and when interrogating the deadly resentments fomented by racial and class divisions on an island that appears from the outside to be Paradise.

Beautiful cover. Gorgeous writing. 2021 is shaping up to be stellar year for literature!

Take a Romp with Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club

If I never get to live my dream of retiring to Louise Penny’s Three Pines on the outskirts of Montreal, my second choice is now Richard Osman’s Coopers Chase in the British countryside where I hope the members of “The Thursday Murder Club” will find my skills as a reference librarian suitable for entrée.

Joyce is keeping a diary, so it is through her voice that we are first introduced to Elizabeth, Ron, and Ibrahim, the remaining members of the murder club. Since Penny, a former DCI who absconded with files of unsolved crimes upon her retirement, had a stroke and moved to the nursing home, the club has been circumspectly seeking a fourth member. As a former nurse, Joyce seems a perfect fit.

Joyce has a wry sense of humor, is not the least bit sentimental, and had me frequently laughing out loud, but forget the reviews that call this murder mystery hilarious. Osman has imbued his debut novel with deep psychological insight into the nature of aging with dignity, living with grief, and coping with loneliness.

Tony Curran had left the life of a drug dealer far behind, going straight as a contractor for the smarmy Ian Ventham, fast-talking, loose with the truth developer of Coopers Chace. Ventham has an unpopular expansion in mind, one that would mean the destruction of the ancient Catholic cemetery on the property, where many of the Chace’s seniors walk for exercise and contemplation.

But all those new units mean job security for Curran so why are Ian and Tony having such a heated altercation in the Coopers Chase parking lot for all the community to witness? And what to think when Curran turns up in a pool of his own blood on his luxurious kitchen floor? The Thursday Murder Club is chomping at the bit to get involved. They begin by enticing Donna, an officer recently relocated from London and bored out of her mind, to a meet and greet heavy on desserts and wine. Soon she introduces her DCI, Chris Hudson, to the group and they’re off and running.

Osman sprinkles his story with enough red herrings to keep clever readers on their toes throughout, but it’s his take on human nature that I loved most about this book. Life is so precarious. One bad choice made early on can ruin a life forever. How does one outrun his past? Is there more than one acceptable way to make amends for a youthful mistake? I found this to be a wise, wonderful discourse on human frailty wrapped in a complex murder plot that stymied me until the very end.