Review by Booklist Review
Winner of multiple Italian literary prizes, Raimo's (The Girl at the Door, 2019) work of autofiction reads like a series of interconnected short stories highlighting the coming-of-age mishaps of a quirky young woman. Protagonist Veronica is something of a pathological liar, or at least exaggerator. She rigs a simple dice game she plays with her brother, pretends she has insomnia, writes fake letters to advice columns, and makes up dreams to have them analyzed. A painting that hangs in her parents' home is one that she pretended she painted as a child but actually stole. Perhaps it is to compete with her brother, whom her mother prefers, but more likely, it is simply to combat boredom. But it is no surprise that these fabrications turn her into a writer. A--no surprise--consistently unreliable narrator, Veronica has a distinct voice and is very funny, even when addressing very unfunny things. Lurking under all this is Raimo's fascinating contemplation of the interplay of identity and memory.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Raimo (The Girl at the Door) turns her well-honed satirical gaze inward in this winning work of autofiction. The narrator, Veronica, grows up in 1980s Rome with an overprotective father who douses her in rubbing alcohol at the first sign of any ailment. Her mother, meanwhile, favors Veronica's older brother and imagines nightmarish scenarios involving his kidnapping or death whenever he's out of the house. Veronica and her brother grow up to be writers and tangle over who should immortalize their eccentric family in books: "I envied siblings who argued over an inheritance, over a house," Veronica reflects, a shard of truth in her generally unreliable narration (elsewhere, she claims to fear "truth more than death"). A fabulist from a family of fabulists, Veronica offers up memories on one page only to question or revise them on the next. This haziness extends to her outward appearance, as friends and even her mother have difficulty recognizing her. The shambolic text flits between childhood and adulthood, doomed affairs and friendships, ribaldry (flashers, masturbation, constipation), and a revelation about the private life of Veronica's father. Despite the narrator's evasiveness, a thrum of honesty bleeds through. With its stellar voice, Raimo's inquisitive and vulnerable novel proves tough to put down. (June)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A coming-of-age story set in Italy and filled with humor and neuroses. When Veronica falls ill with rheumatic fever as a child, her father--whose pastimes include building walls in their apartment, worrying about radiation, and yelling--is overjoyed that someone in their family is actually sick and wraps Vero in paper towels because he's convinced that sweating will harm her. Later, Vero's mother, not to be outdone in an unspoken competition of maladjusted parenting, calls Vero on the phone several times a month to say that her brother, Christian, has died, all because he didn't immediately respond to his mother's texts. Vero's childhood and adulthood are on full display in this novel, as we are invited into her home to witness the absurd, the loving, and the traumatic. She navigates an isolated childhood during which she and Christian watch children play in the courtyard below their apartment but are not allowed by their parents to join in. (In one particularly distressing yet absurd moment, they witness the neighborhood children playing soccer using a toad in lieu of a ball.) There is also Vero's adolescence, full of first loves, best friends, and familial abuse, and an adulthood spent trying to reconcile it all through her writing. Raimo weaves together a series of nonlinear vignettes with a deft hand, connecting seemingly disparate moments through themes of longing, loneliness, identity, and, perhaps most profoundly, the concept of memory itself: "But how can you reconcile with something or someone if your memories are hazy? If they change in the very process of forming? They can take away everything but our memories, people say. But who would ever be interested in that kind of expropriation?" A witty and complex portrait of a woman becoming herself. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
