Review by Booklist Review
Thirty years after her mother, Viola, disappeared from their New Jersey home, Laura returns to Italy, where Viola was born and where she met Laura's father, an American GI. Viola was a devoted if deeply anxious parent who rarely spoke about her early life and spent hours creating paintings of a mysterious red building. Laura traces her mother's story to the town of Alberobello, where an old man mistakes her for Viola. Tommaso takes Laura to La Casa Rossa, a hulking building that she immediately recognizes from the paintings. Laura is shocked to learn that it served as a concentration camp, and that Italian Jews, including Viola and her family, were interned there. Morris (All the Way to the Tigers, 2020) intersperses Laura's narration with Viola's first-person account of her time in the camp, where Tommaso was a prison guard. As she uncovers the terrible choices Viola made in order to survive, Laura confronts the legacy of trauma. A travel writer as well as a novelist, Morris brings to life the beauty of Italy and the horrors in the Red House.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Laura is 12 when her mother, Viola, disappears from their home in suburban New Jersey, leaving behind her keys and purse. This shocks Laura and her father; Viola was so loving and seemed so happy. The police are unable to track her down, nor can the private detective hired by Laura's father. Thirty years pass. Laura, now married and living in Manhattan, is still tormented by her mother's disappearance. She's also at a crossroads in her marriage and decides to go to Brindisi, Italy, where she was born, and seek clues to where her mother might have gone when she disappeared, perhaps even locate her. Laura eventually finds the house where she resided until she was 7, but no one living in the neighborhood has any distinct memories of her family, until she meets an older man who knew Viola when she was a young woman during the Nazi invasion of southern Italy. The man reluctantly leads Laura to the tiny red house that was the subject of her mother's paintings, on which she wrote "I will not be here forever." Could this be the clue Laura's been looking for? VERDICT With Viola's narrative of her own past deftly woven in with Viola's, this is a poignant and lyrical story, like the other works of award-winning Morris (Gateway to the Moon).--Marcia Welsh
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Why did Laura Smith's mother, Viola Umberto Wilkins, vanish from her 12-year-old daughter's life? Thirty years later, in search of an explanation, Laura begins to uncover Viola's complicated, tragic past. It's more about the journey than the arrival in Morris' latest, a somber account of three generations of women, with a focus on abandonment. Laura has spent decades wondering about various explanations for her mother's disappearance and dealing with the associated pain of unknowing. Now, at 42--the same age Viola was when she left--and for vague reasons, she sets about tracing her mother's history, traveling to Brindisi, Italy, where the family lived till Laura was 6, when they moved to New Jersey. The Italian Viola had met Laura's father, a U.S. serviceman, near Naples during World War II, and Laura believed that was where Viola's roots were. But in Italy, she is able to locate a building called the Red House, the repeated subject of Viola's paintings, and this discovery, plus conversations with an old man, Tommaso Bassano, reveal startling facts. Viola was Jewish--not Catholic, as Laura thought--and she, her parents, and brother Rudy were displaced from Turin and imprisoned with other Jews at the Red House in 1942, swept up in the violent antisemitic segregation of the era. Now the narrative switches--sometimes confusingly--between Viola's and Laura's perspectives. Viola catches the eye of young Italian soldier Tommaso, who loves her and tries to help the starving Jews. As the novel's historical dimension intensifies, embracing Viola's parents' stories, too, its mood darkens and it becomes an ever-harsher consideration of survival. Laura's pilgrimage to Italy helps her heal and understand her mother better, but other facets of the story remain unresolved. It's a melancholy spiral of a narrative, at times slack and repetitive and with loose ends, but the unusual historical aspect lends gravitas. A solemn, sometimes-sketchy family excavation. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
