Review by Booklist Review
An international best-seller, this spare novel shares similar themes with De Luca's earlier novel, Sea of Memory (1999), also a coming-of-age story about first love, the weight of history, and the horrors of the Holocaust. In first-person diary entries, a 13-year-old boy records his daily life in God's Mountain, a poor area of Naples. The boy writes about his first job, his changing body, and Maria, a girl his age who moves into the boy's home after the death of his mother to help care for his grieving father. Filled with the weight and wonder of newly discovered adult responsibilities, love and sex, and the rough life of his neighborhood, the boy's language still maintains the easy magic of childhood, superstitions, and the logic of dreams: a beloved friend--a Holocaust survivor--grows wings in the hump of his rounded back, eventually disappearing. More impressionistic than linear, this is a haunting, atmospheric novel that muses on religion, language, community, and what it means to be an adult, all against the backdrop of a rough, often violent port city where "you grow up quickly." --Gillian Engberg
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
With a surreal and quiet economy reminiscent of Max Frisch's Man in the Holocene (or perhaps Beckett's Ill Seen, Ill Said, only without the verbal gymnastics), this international bestseller has some of the innocent charm of Saint-Exupry and much of the darkness to which European literary fiction is heir. The narrative is the diary of a 13-year-old boy at the cusp of manhood in an isolated world. The setting is Montedidio, or "God's Mountain," a "neighborhood of alleyways" in Naples, Italy, in the 1960s. The unnamed narrator struggles to learn "proper Italian" in lieu of his native dialect as he labors at a carpentry workshop and stoically observes the inexorable decline of his mother's health. His upstairs neighbor, Maria, a sadly wise girl his own age who's been seduced by their landlord, initiates his sexual experience. The tableau of near-grotesques includes a good-hearted homosexual printer, a hunchbacked Jewish cobbler who narrowly escaped the Holocaust, and the sensed presence of spirits and angels. The language, while simple, has surprising, fresh moments: the cobbler's cheerful stories "pump" the narrator's bones "full of air." Teardrops "burst" from eyes "with a shot from inside." While little new ground is covered, the book is effective in its poignant immediacy, as the narrator bears the rigors of a lonely and tragic coming of age. The story also chronicles the narrator's central passion: his boomerang, a gift from his father. As a simple and elegant trope, the boomerang encompasses both the freedom and hope inherent in his longing to escape, as well as the futility of his aspirations. After all, it flies far, but returns no matter how hard he tries to cast it away. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
Adult/High School-Montedidio is a poor neighborhood in Naples where in 1960 a 13-year-old takes a giant step toward manhood. He leaves school and goes to work for a carpenter; meets Maria, who awakens his sexuality; and makes friends with a cobbler, Rafaniello, a Jewish refugee from the horrors of World War II. Rafaniello, a hunchback, says his hump contains angel wings that some day will unfold so he can fly to Jerusalem. For his birthday, the teen's father gives him a boomerang, a gift from a sailor, and it becomes his talisman; he wears it inside his shirt and builds his strength by pretending to throw it. His mother is dying, and Papa spends all his time at the hospital, so the boy is on his own, but for his girlfriend. With his wife's death, his father's world crumbles, and the boy becomes his support and comfort. On New Year's Eve, he finally throws the boomerang from the rooftop of his building and Rafaniello flings himself into the night sky, leaving behind two feathers. The boy's diary reveals his innermost thoughts as he faces loss, finds love, and learns self-reliance, all in six months. Written with eloquence and simplicity, this novella describes the universal challenges of adolescence, irrespective of time and place.-Molly Connally, Chantilly Regional Library, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
After Sea of Memory (1999), De Luca offers another symbolic tale of adolescence, filling a few crucial months in the life of a Neapolitan boy. When he turns 13, much happens to our narrator: he finishes with school; goes to work; falls in love; and waits as his mother becomes ill and dies. All of this takes place in a poor part of Naples known as Montedidio-God's Mountain. And it does seem touched by God. The boy's new job is as assistant to cabinet-maker Errico, for whom "the day is a morsel. One bite and it's gone, so let's get busy." Errico gives over a corner of his shop to the humpback cobbler Rafaniello, refugee from a European village annihilated recently by WWII. In a gifted, saintly, almost magical way, Rafaniello, in this workshop of boy, cobbler, and carpenter, repairs the shoes of the poor so they're as good as new. Another wooden object, meanwhile, plays a big part in the boy's life: a boomerang, birthday gift from his father. Inside Rafaniello's hump, we learn, are wings that before long will "hatch," enabling their kindly owner, as he devoutly desires, to fly from Naples to Jerusalem. The boy, meanwhile, practices and practices how to throw his boomerang-without yet letting it go, since in crowded Montedidio "there's not enough room to spit between your feet" let alone release a boomerang. But practice builds up his muscles, something noticed by Maria, a girl his own age who lives in his building and has been keeping her family from eviction through sexual favors to the aging landlord. That all ends, however, when her love for the boy gives her-and him-a new power, purity, and happiness. Themes converge-age, youth, desire, sanctity, flight-on New Year's Eve, when things happen, or seem to, that bring all to a hopeful and lovely close. A holiday tale of wondrously humble miracles without once becoming saccharine. Lovely indeed.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by School Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
